Placebo effect, founding experience was a legend

At the beginning of 1944, the battle broke out on the Italian front. The wounded flock to the US Army Field Hospital, but Lieutenant Colonel Henry Beecher, a civilian life anesthesiologist, ran out of morphine. Then he has a funny idea: inject a saline solution and make the victim think it’s a useful analgesic. And it works… Here it aroused the interest of Henry Beecher, and the beginning of an adventure that will open a new era in the study of the placebo effect. A story as beautiful as medicine loves to tell, where misfortune smiles at the daring and makes science take a giant step. But the best stories are not always the truest … And this story, most likely, is completely wrong.

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Henry Beecher was an anesthesiologist, served on the Italian front and then developed the science of the placebo effect. But this physiological story of saline injected with morphine … has been told by several authors, including …