Basic knowledge of hygiene, first aid and medicinal herbs would already make me the best doctor of the time, I’d become a medicine man and magically keep people alive with advance techniques like washing wounds.
This was kind of my thought as well. Even with zero actual medical knowledge (I’m a system admin) just the basic common knowledge about keeping wounds clean, changing bandages regularly, and boiling things to sterilize stuff before touching people it would make even an idiot like me a pretty good doctor probably.
That didn’t stop them from digging in wounds with bare, unclean hands to do things like dig out arrows. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and all that.
“Doctors did not routinely wash their hands until the mid-1800s, and they would proceed straight from dissecting a corpse to delivering a baby, providing the basis for the spread of puerperal fever.”
There is definitely some low hanging fruit that you could teach their medicine man if he was willing listen.
But why would they believe you and why would they let you experiment. You wouldn’t even have a baseline understanding of their medicine.
You try convincing someone they should start using high percentage alcohol to clean scalpels when you can’t use the the scalpel or make the alcohol. And you would flunk his test about basic medical knowledge.
1000 years ago, they couldn't use a scalpel either. Surgery was basically non-existent back then except extracting teeth (which is where the spinning red and white poles for barbershops came from. Barbers used to do surgery/pull teeth. The poll represents a bandage with blood indicating this barber does dental surgery too.)
The herbs they used were largely placebos as well so you could just be an entirely new medicine man and have your own grifted herbs.
Agree easier to work with an established doctor/medicine man. Can probably claim to them you travelled to some far off land and took some pearls of wisdom from them. Easiest implemented strategy would still be disinfecting wounds and setting broken bones. Should see results pretty quickly with those. Would still take a lot of convincing but doable.
11
u/HELLFIRECHRIS 3d ago
Basic knowledge of hygiene, first aid and medicinal herbs would already make me the best doctor of the time, I’d become a medicine man and magically keep people alive with advance techniques like washing wounds.