Marriage counselling is like 17th century medicine

I was reading someplace that sick people visiting physicians in the Victorian age were worse off, not better by going to the doctor.

No one knew anything about hygiene in Victorian-Era England. People were not aware that disease was spread by germs which thrived on dirt. People didn’t realize that shitting in their drinking water was bad. They did not think of handwashing before eating street cleaning. Diseases spread quickly. People dreaded catching malaria, which they thought came from a poisonous gas called ‘miasma’ from sewers and corpses. Doctors still believed the ideas of the Greek physician Galen. He thought that the body was ruled by four humours (fluids) which determined what your personality was and how you reacted to various diseases. Example:

• Blood/Sanguine - hot: fiery personality

• Phlegm - cold: calm personality

• Yellow bile - dry: bad-tempered personality

• Black bile - moist: melancholy personality.

Opening up to your wife about your insecurities and vulnerabilities is the same as applying leeches and bloodletting. Egalitarian relationships with women make as much sense as bleeding out an already weak person.

Reading about misguided attempts to cure illness in the 18th century reads no different than an unplugged man watching Dadbod try to save his marriage through therapy and marriage counselling. At least the leechers didn’t promote eugenics and only switch to marriage counselling after some Austrian painter ruined it for his career.