🧪 The placebo-controlled trial wasn't invented by doctors. It was invented by medieval witch hunters.

In 1423, Jean Gerson proposed testing religious claims with consecrated vs unconsecrated objects that looked identical - the same logic behind modern placebo controls.

His method ended up in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). In 1599, a French physician used it to prove a "possessed" girl wasn't really possessed - she reacted the same to real and fake holy water.

That trick-trial design reached Lavoisier and Franklin, who used it to debunk mesmerism in 1784 - the direct ancestor of every clinical trial.

Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768231207260

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