Here are my highlights from “Placebos and placebo effects in medicine: historical overview,” by Anton de Craen and colleagues. All are direct quotes.
- In 1807 Thomas Jefferson, recording what he called the pious fraud, observed that ‘one of the most successful physicians I have ever known has assured me that he used more bread pills, drops of colored water, and powders of hickory ashes, than of all other medicines put together’. About a hundred years later, Richard Cabot, of Harvard Medical School, described how he ‘was brought up, as I suppose every physician is, to use placebo, bread pills, water subcutaneously, and other devices’.
- The word placebo (Latin, ‘I shall please’) was first used in the 14th century. In that period, it referred to hired mourners at funerals. These individuals often began their wailings with Placebo Domino in regione vivorum, the ninth verse of psalm cxiv, which in the Latin Vulgate translation means ‘I shall please the Lord in the land of the living’. Here, the word placebo carries the connotation of depreciation and substitution, because professional mourners were often stand-ins for members of the family of the deceased.
- In 1801, John Haygarth reported the results of what may have been the first placebo-controlled trial. A common remedy for many diseases at that time was to apply metallic rods, known as Perkins tractors, to the body. These rods were supposed to relieve symptoms through the electromagnetic influence of the metal. Haygarth treated five with imitation tractors made of wood and patients found that four gained relief. He used the metal tractors on the same five patients the following day and obtained identical results: four of five subjects reported relief.
- In the 1785 New Medical Dictionary, placebo is described as ‘a commonplace method or medicine’. In 1811, the revised Quincy’s Lexicon-Medicum as ‘an epithet given to any medicine adapted defines placebo more to please than to benefit the patient’.
- In the 1930s, several important papers were published with regard to the introduction of placebos in clinical research. [… Two] papers assessed the value of drugs used in the treatment of angina pectoris in cross-over experiments and deceptively administered placebos to the ‘no-treatment’ comparison group. […] In both trials the drugs were judged to exert no specific action that might be useful in the treatment of angina. Gold and colleagues tried to explain why inert interventions might work: their points included ‘confidence aroused in a treatment’, the ‘encouragement afforded a new and ‘a of medical by procedure’ change advisor’.
- Placebo was a fraud and deception that had the ‘moral effect of a remedy given specially for the disease’, but placebos did not affect the natural course of disease; they were a priori excluded from having such an impact. Placebos were therapeutic duds to manage patients, or, as in the Flint investigation, a camouflage behind which to watch nature take its course.
- In 1938, the word placebo was first applied in reference to the treatment given to concurrent controls in a trial.
- The efficacy of cold vaccines was evaluated in several placebo-controlled trials. […] The conclusion [of one] reads ‘one of the most significant aspects of this study is the great reduction in the number of colds which the members of the control groups reported during the experimental period. In fact these results were as good as many of those reported in uncontrolled studies which recommended the use of cold vaccines’. The placebo effect was born.
