The 1788 Doctors' Riot | Hacker News Reader

The 1788 Doctors' Riot

en.wikipedia.org

58 pointstuxmascot28 comments

I was surprised not to see any mention of Burke & Hare under the “See Also” section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Hare_murders

These guys started out doing roughly the same as those doctors - robbing freshly dug graves for anatomical study - but they moved on to killing to provide the bodies instead. Pretty grim

> but they moved on to killing to provide the bodies instead

Wasn't H. H. Holmes also accused of this? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H_H_Holmes)

I hadn't heard of him, but yeah it does seem like the same sort of deal! In case anyone wants a brief summary here's the key bit from that page:

""" Holmes had an entrepreneurial spirit. Based on his former medical education and his connections, he was able to sell skeletons to medical labs and schools. "He, and sometimes a hired assistant, were accused of stripping the flesh off the bodies, dissecting them, and preparing the viable skeletons. The rest of the remains would be tossed in pits of lime or acid, effectively breaking down the remaining evidence." """

One of the classic true crime story.

Edit: that facial reconstruction of William Burke is really interesting.

It's there now! Was added after you wrote this and before I read your comment.

Oh great! I was considering adding it later on but I was on the tram and didn't fancy fiddling with wikipedia on my phone :D

Fascinating. It is quite shocking to read about our world not so long ago. I did dissection at university from a cadavar donated for education. We attended a service afterwards, prior to the cremation. I was very grateful to have the chance to learn from it in a way that would have been almost impossible using prosections or models.

<pedantry> No doctors actually rioted; thus the title words Doctors' Riot seems strange </pedantry>

In that era riots were often named for locations or the thing/person/event that instigated them. So, rather than it being a statement of who was rioting, it was an assertion for the reason for the riot. That's why we have the Sacheverell (sp?) and Gordon Riots: the first was sparked by the prosecution of an important prelate, the second was instigated by an English nobleman who opposed the restoration of rights to Catholic Englishmen.

I agree. The implication is the opposite of reality, and I can't help but feel it's intentional.

It's not intentional. It's just that how we described riots changed from the 18th C to today. Now we often describe who is rioting in the name of the riot. Back then they would often describe what sparked the riot in the name as opposed to who was rioting.

I'd love a good riot against Physicians in 2021.

2 centuries of corruption has lined their pockets and caused the rest of us to avoid medical care.

I say this as I'm married to a doctor taking home 200-250k/yr. I don't mind shooting myself in the foot to save life.

I would look up the ladder before blaming physicians. It's not the high salary of the doctor that's inflated the cost of medical care. It's insurance, middlemen, overpaid administrators, and the general move to for-profit medicine that's to blame in my experience. Doctors make good money, but they also go through 8 years of expensive schooling to get there and are often just making ends meet for years after school.

Not in the industry, and these are complex issues, but the AMA is made up of doctors and is also a huge part of how medical professionals are qualified and has heavy influence on how funding for training, etc. is allocated. So while an individual physician may not be 'the problem', blaming the AMA (and so 'physicians') shouldn't be dismissed outright in favor of the other groups you mention, which are also part of the problem

The AMA certainly has physicians as members, but I would call it a stretch to say they represent the interests of a majority of physicians.

Plus, the AMA/AOA has been lobbying for more residency spots for a while now, which would increase supply for physicians. These are generally things that could bring down costs.

Everything's part of the problem. It's why it's so hard to find "the thing" that causes high US healthcare costs. Every single part of it is more expensive than it should be, including doctors, and it all adds up to a system that's way more expensive than it should be, without any single entity or group being responsible for most of the problem.

I guess I feel like someone who did 8 years of school and I believe 4 years of residency which altogether generally costs them over $100k should be compensated for those expenditures of time and money. I don't feel that an aspirin should cost $5 just because you're laying in a hospital bed.

Maybe it's the opacity surrounding billing. What exactly costs $7k when you are hospitalized for 3 days? Hell, let's skip the ER and the procedures and go with a mental health inpatient stay. There's 72 hours of oversight by the staff. If they're making $20/hour, which isn't off-base to my knowledge and may be generous as they generally aren't BSNs, that's $1440 in wages. Food for 3 days and maybe an hour, hour and a half of the doctor's time over the course of 3 days, and medication. Those additional things don't add up to the remaining $5,560. Even with the cost of the building, electricity, janitors, it doesn't add up. So why does it cost so much for a 3 day stay without an emergency medical procedure?

We stayed 1 day at a hospital and was billed 8k.

Also Physicians make 200-600k/yr, that pays for the school in a year.

I'm sure there are specialists who make $600k a year. At least around here, primary care docs make around $200k max. Even if they're making $600k, that doesn't even begin to explain why hospital costs are so high. Some napkin math says $600k/year, 52 weeks/year, 40 hours/week is about $288.46 per hour. If you spent 10 hours that day with a very highly compensated doctor, that's less than $3k. So where does the other 5k of that bill come from?

Where did you see that years of education "should" or in general "do" lead to higher salaries lol ?

Why shouldn't they? I never said they statistically do lead to higher salaries, just that it's reasonable to compensate someone who has put that much money and time in should be compensated for it and I don't begrudge the physicians their pay.

Salary is market value.

If you spend time studying something useless or not making money you wont get money. Its as simple as that.

So a medical degree is useless? The market value for a doctor is less than what they're making? I seriously don't understand what you're trying to say here.

Physician salaries only make up about 8.6% of all healthcare costs. That’s less than Germany, Australia, France, etc.

Healthcare costs do need to come down, but slashing physician salaries should be near the bottom of the list of things to target.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/ph...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6179628/#__sec1...

Strictly this problem is fairly local to the US - other countries manage to not have an engineered shortage of medically trained folks, and provide general, non-bankrupting, insurance schemes to pay them for their expertise.

Healthcare is so corrupt that life expectancy in the US went from 40 years old in 1880 to nearly 80 years old today. What a crime! https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

The number is a bit misleading since it mixes in child mortalities.

If you look at the life expectancy for someone who's already reached age 45, since 1880 to now the US has gone from ~70yrs -> ~81 years.

A much less significant change

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectation-age-45-b...

We'll, it's 80 in both US and Germany and the total health-related expenditure per capita is twice as high in the US than Germany. I think the question is what that extra money is buying

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