Medicine Journal : Chronic fatigue syndrome - Stephen Perry 2020

Is that what the indigenous people call the Dream Time in Oz?
Or just when I were a lad and 't milkman 'ad a hoss and t' papers were in black and white?

 

I think it's a reference to the Star Trek episode "Miri," in which a 300-year old "young girl" refers to the era before her world was destroyed by a man-made plague as "The Before Time."



[I once worked at a SF Bay Area company where some of the employees referred to the period before a corporate takeover as "The Before Time." It was definitely a Star Trek reference in that case. ]

 

I loved that episode. Kim Darby played Miri. They had hundreds of years at pre-adolescence and then when they hit puberty they sped through many years in seconds and died. The start was getting big lesions on your legs and arms. Miri had a big crush on Kirk and was jealous of his whatever with the blond beehive woman, Yeoman Rand.

Add: Another favorite was City on the Edge of Forever, with Joan Collins as Edith Keeler, who runs a soup kitchen in the late 1930s in NY and as it turns out leads a US pacifist movement that slows US entry into WWII and allows Germany to win. Kirk falls in love with her but Spock tells him she has to die to save the world and all future history from a German victory. She figures out somethings suspicious when Kirk doesn't know who Clark Gable is.

 

Ha, making stuff up has a long and illustrious history in medicine.

* The 1970s, McEvedy and Beard made up mass hysteria to explain the Royal free hospital outbreak (largely based on the fact that most victims were women)
* The 40s, Moniz got a Nobel prize for coming up with the lobotomy and claiming it was good for the mentally ill.
* Freud lauded in his day and still famed today for making almost everything up
* Galen's humours, totally made up, he was lauded for centuries

I rest my case.

 

Elsevier are issuing in parts an "evidence based" medical textbook that is demonstrably out of date. Ironic, when the prime mover for EBM in the early '90s was the reaction against a medical curriculum based on textbooks which were never up to date.