“Modern” science often repackages medieval categories
There is a longstanding tradition of borrowing older scientific or medical categories, merely updating the terminology but keeping the same (invalid) assertions.
When the nineteenth-century medicolegal term “homosexuality” was brought into official Catholic speech, it replaced the eleventh-century theological term “sodomy.” “Homosexuality” took the place of “sodomy” in the way a substitute teacher takes over a class. It arrived, rushing and confused, to face an already fixed lesson plan. —Mark D. Jordan, The Silence of Sodom
Other examples, a far from incomplete list:
- “Degeneracy” theory → “racial theory” (Francis Mark Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality)
- Hysteria → PMS (PMS and other pathologies are culture-bound syndromes)
- Hysteria → nymphomania (“Nymphomania was just a fancy new way of saying “madness from the womb,” really, with just as much going for it as a scientific concept.” —Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us)
- see also: we rediscover and rename old ideas all the time—the process isn’t necessarily negative