© Katherine Streeter for NPR
Sometime around 1907, well before the modern randomized clinical trial was routine, American psychiatrist Henry Cotton began removing decaying teeth from his patients in hopes of curing their mental disorders. If that didn't work he moved on to more invasive excisions: tonsils, testicles, ovaries and, in some cases, colons.
Cotton was the newly appointed director of the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane and was acting on a theory proposed by influential Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Adolph Meyer, under whom Cotton had studied, that psychiatric illness is the result of chronic infection.
Meyer's idea was based on observations that patients with high fevers sometimes experience delusions and hallucinations.Cotton ran with the idea, scalpel in hand.
In 1921 he published a well-received book on the theory called
The Defective Delinquent and Insane: the Relation of Focal Infections to Their Causation, Treatment and Prevention. A few years later
The New York Times wrote, "eminent physicians and surgeons testified that the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane was the most progressive institution in the world for the care of the insane, and that the newer method of treating the insane by the removal of focal infection placed the institution in a unique position with respect to hospitals for the mentally ill." Eventually Cotton opened a hugely successful private practice, catering to the infected molars of Trenton, N.J., high society.
Following his death in 1933, interest in Cotton's cures waned. His mortality rates hovered at a troubling 45 percent, and in all likelihood his treatments didn't work. But though his rogue surgeries were dreadfully misguided and disfiguring,
a growing body of research suggests that there might be something to his belief that infection - and with it inflammation - is involved in some forms of mental illness.
Comment: Once again the WHO is using biased statistics to try and scare the populace into believing that eating meat is bad for our health. The reality, however, is that meat and animal fats are necessary for optimal functioning, and the more these lies are spread the worse off people will be. Shame on you, WHO!