19th Century Medicine: Be Grateful

May 10, 2024August 7, 2024 Rilaly1 Comment

“When it comes to modern medicine, do you ever feel grateful?”

“I mean, yeah, but that’s like being grateful that Jupiter doesn’t fall off its axis. We know the catastrophe that would happen if it wasn’t there, but it’s always been there, so it’s tough to remain grateful for it.”

“Are you grateful for your good health?”

“Yeah, of course, but again, that’s like being grateful for good weather. We don’t notice it until the bad weather hits. We have to constantly have our perspective adjusted to appreciate health, wealth, and weather.”

“Because after reading Thomas Morris’ The Mystery of The Exploding Teeth, I went real grateful that I didn’t end up in a different time. I know what you’re saying about it’s always been there, but damn, you read what those 19^th Century doctors were doing to their patients back then, and it seems like they were just guessing most of the time.”

“Look, our moms took us to the doctor, and he fixed it. It’s what they do. I never considered myself ungrateful, or taking it for granted, but it’s their jobs.”

“Fair enough, but did you ever have something your doctor couldn’t fix? That’s some scary stuff, let me tell you. They put us through an array of tests, they prescribe stuff, just to see what works, “Take two of these and call me in the morning.” What if nothing your doctor tries, works? Who do you blame? We don’t blame the researchers for failing to develop that perfect pharmaceutical to cure what ails us, we don’t blame innovators for failing to develop technological advancements necessary to find out what’s wrong with us, and we don’t blame modern medicine for being as yet ill-equipped or ill-informed to deal with our mysterious ailment. We blame our doctor. Our doctor is the hero or the zero, because they are our face of modern medicine. They’re who we see when we think of medicine. If you’re the one they can’t cure, it would be difficult for you to be grateful for the advancements of modern medicine, but the rest of should remember that for everything we can’t cure yet, the list of what we now can cure should earn a whole lot of gratitude. You’re right, it’s difficult to be grateful for good health, or life in general, but reading through a brief history of 19^th Century medicine should remind us all to be grateful that we are not living in constant pain, and that our species managed to survive at all.”

Previous generations reminded us to remain grateful, “Always be grateful for the times you live in, because I’ve seen worse, and my parents saw far worse.” They don’t understand our technology, and the machines their doctors put them through overwhelm them. “Don’t take it for granted,” they say. The lead by example in this dictum, because they can’t believe they’re still alive, relatively healthy, and pain-free. No matter what they say or do, however, we were born with this technology, and we can’t help but take for granted what has always been there for us.

Author Thomas Morris might provide a better perspective for why we should be grateful, by “gently mocking” the medical practitioners of the 19^th Century for their practices and procedures. Before gently mocking them, however, Morris adds two qualifiers every writer who compiles such material for a book should add before gently mocking prior eras for their lack of scientific knowledge:

“The methods they used were consistent with their understanding of how the body worked, and it is not their fault that medical knowledge has advanced considerably since then.”

It’s not their fault, I would add, and it’s wasn’t their doing. The doctors, family practitioners, or ear, nose, and throat specialists of the era were handcuffed by the constraints of knowledge at the time, and as Morris adds they performed admirably under such constraints.

“One thing that these case histories demonstrate is the admirably tenacious, even bloody-minded, determination of doctors to help their patients, in an age when their art left much to be desired.”

We could use the hindsight of modern medicine to call early 19^th century medicine something of a guessing game, but will 23^rd Century medical professionals think the same thing of 21^st Century medicine? Western medicine has come a long way in 200 years, and Morris’ book emphasizes that, but professionals in various medical fields will admit Thomas Morris could write a second book called The 21^st Century: What We Still Don’t Know. Modern authors probably won’t be able to write such a book, because they don’t know what they don’t know, but a Mental Floss article details some of basic, fundamentals we still don’t understand yet, including: why we cry, why we laugh, why we sleep, why we dream, why we itch, and how we age. These matters might seem insignificant in terms of greater physical health, but if we can unlock those mysteries, what answers might follow? As with modern medicine, The 19^th Century medical professionals had precedent, studies, and literature to study and guide their decisions, but the precedents they followed, like ours, were as flawed as they were.

Thomas Morris, prefaces a quote from an article James Young Simpson, the pioneer of chloroform anesthesia, writing, “[Simpson] cautioned that it was unwise to be too hard on the “extravagance and oddity” of their methods, adding presciently:

“Perhaps, some century or two hence, our successors … will look back upon our present massive and clumsy doses of vegetable powders, bulky salts, nauseous decoctions, etc., with as much wonderment and surprise as we now look back upon the therapeutic means of our ancestors.”

Morris’ qualifiers illustrate how annoying it is to read modern authors assume a level of authority, even intellectual superiority, over the most brilliant minds of another era without qualifiers. These modern authors critique past knowledge and technology from the pedestal of modern research, acquired knowledge, and technology as if they had anything to do with it. Few of these authors acknowledge that they, like the rest of us, are the beneficiaries of modern advancements, even though they have not personally contributed anything to the difference between the eras.

That being said, we all know the line: “those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.” There’s nothing wrong with mocking and ridiculing the past, because it makes the art of teaching history more entertaining, and we find mockery entertaining, but the author of it should provide some sort of context.

Thomas Morris pursuit of this is also admirable in another way, as it displays a takeaway, we can’t help but reach by the time we finish his book, gratitude. How many minor ailments (and there’s no such thing as minor when we’re suffering from them) can we magically resolve with two aspirin, ibuprofen, or a series of prescribed doses of antibiotics? How many procedures (currently considered routine) cure what harms us? How grateful are we to the technological innovators, doctors, and all of those who played roles (be they unwitting or otherwise) in the trial-and-error processes involved in research that have contributed to the progress medicine has made in such a relatively short time. It’s relatively difficult to be grateful for life, but as Morris’ book alludes, we should be grateful that our ancestors survived at all. We wouldn’t have the luxury of regarding our modern medicine as commonplace if they hadn’t, because as incredible as the human body is, it’s possible, and even probable, that we shouldn’t be here.

How did our ancestors survive the plague? World History Encyclopedia lists cures such as rubbing bare chicken butts on lesions, chopped up snakes, and drinking crushed unicorn horns as some of the more popular remedies at the time. They also list drinking crushed emeralds, arsenic, and mercury straight, with no chasers. How did they/we survive?

We currently believe in using cardiopulmonary resuscitation when a person stops breathing, but 19^thcentury man believed, as Morris writes, that blowing tobacco smoke in someone’s rectum might revive them after, for example, a drowning. Other periodicals note that physicians played around with blowing smoke into the mouth and nose, but they found the rectal method more effective. “The nicotine in the tobacco was thought to stimulate the heart to beat stronger and faster, thus encouraging respiration. The smoke was also thought to warm the victim and dry out the person’s insides, removing excessive moisture.”

The “How did we survive?” head-shaking laughter the follows hearing such measures might cement the fact that no one ever tries to pass such foolish nonsense along again. While we’re laughing, however, let’s keep in mind how much information, innovation and technology benefits our definition of modern know-how. We could go through that list, but even if we bullet-pointed it, it would be so lengthy that our eyes might glaze over, and we might accidentally dismiss a most vital discovery, such as the germ theory.

How did we survive the years preceding someone’s idea that they might be able to scientifically confirm the idea that the onset and spread of disease might have something to do with microorganisms, pathogens, and germs. They suggested that eating spoiled food, drinking stagnant water and poorly preserved alcohol, among other things could cause disease and the spread thereof. Modern readers might “Of course!” such findings now, but it rocked the scientific community at the time. Although the records show that the idea that microorganisms might be the cause for the spread of disease dates back to ancient civilizations, the scientifically-backed idea was credited to Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch between 1860 to 1880, and that was probably made so late in the 19^th century that we can guess that it wasn’t fully implemented by family doctors (AKA Ear, Nose, and Throat doctors, or ENT) until the early 20^th century. Think about how many lives have been saved by the idea that stagnant water, spoiled food, and fermentation of wine could cause diseases. This first officially documented scientific discovery also paved the way for the first official, scientific discovery of the first, widely used antibiotic penicillin by an Alexander Fleming.

The ENT doctor is our face of modern medicine, much like the police are the face of law in our experience. They are the people we know, but if we think about it, the ENT doctor sits at the bottom of the medical community’s pyramid. They have nothing to do with the research that helps them make determinations on what courses to follow or prescriptions to write. They also use the technological innovations created by others to pinpoint our ailment, so while we could say they are beneficiaries of modern medicine, future experts might say our modern physicians were captive to the limits of 21^st century medical knowledge at the time.

Do we expect our ENT doctor to perform research in a lab before they diagnose us? Do we expect them to trial and error the medicine they prescribe? No, they have to act on the knowledge of those who specialize in those areas, and the 19^th century ENT doctors and surgeons were no different.

How many modern patients enter a general practitioners’ office, see a specialist, and undergo the array of tests we currently have at our disposal, and we still don’t know what’s wrong with them? We hear it all the time, patient A entered the office with a condition that mystified the most brilliant minds of medicine who examined her, and she died before anyone could properly source her ailment. I’ve known such a situation personally, and I’ve witnessed it intimately. I only write that to suggest that my empathy goes out to victims, family members of victims, and anyone who knows someone who has experienced such a matter, but there are times when no one is to blame. When we’re in such a desperate state, or grieving the loss of a loved one, our first inclination is to blame someone for not recognizing her ailment sooner. We blame her doctors, her doctors blamed the specialists, and they all quietly threw their hands up in the air in frustration. Who was at fault, or is anyone? Our advances in modern medicine, since the 19^th Century have been so remarkable that they lead us to believe that we’re at the final frontier. We think if her parents could’ve only found the most brilliant mind of medicine, with all of latest technology available to them, and all of the information research has provided, we think she could’ve been cured. This isn’t to say there hasn’t been instances of malfeasance and misfeasance in the medical community, but as opposed to the TV shows we watch, some of the times even the most brilliant encyclopedic minds of medicine won’t know, because we don’t know yet. That’s the harrowing, humbling truth that no self-respecting doctor, or anyone else in the medical field, will admit is that in some cases the science isn’t there yet.

If we were able to interrogate a family doctor, a surgeon, or someone else in the medical profession of 19^th Century, I imagine a confident professional of that era might say, “Mock away, we deserve it on some level for our lack of knowledge, but you cannot say it was for a lack of trying. We cared deeply what happened to our patients, from the little, old ladies who complained about chronic ailments to devastated small boys, and everyone in between. These were not only our patients, they were our neighbors, and members of our community seeking our knowledge, guidance, and medical assistance to relieve them of horrific illnesses and injuries, and we did our best, with our era’s best knowledge, technological advancements and research, to help them in every single way we could. It’s not what you have today, so mock us all you want, but you cannot say we weren’t trying.”

Anytime I read such a compendium, one of the first things I think about is time machines. We all love the speculative concept of going back in time to talk to long-dead relatives, historical figures, and to experience our romanticized notion of living, if only for a moment, in a different time. The implicit warning books like The Mystery of The Exploding Teeth leave is, if some brilliant mind ever develops the technology to travel back in time, that pioneer taking one giant leap for mankind should check, recheck, and triple check to make sure they get one key component of their technology right before they leave: make sure you can get back. The authors of speculative fiction devote very little space to this need to get back to the present. It’s not very sexy, and no matter how much an author of fiction loves their character, they’re not concerned with the ramifications of their character getting stuck in another time period. They can play this short-term game with their characters, because their characters aren’t real. A real character who knows anything about the research, technology and science that influenced the decisions made by the medical community of the 19^th Century should make getting back their primary concern, because while they will experience worldwide, historic fame for the technology of their contraption, if they’re not able to get back, they might not get to enjoy that fame.

The “Afflicted” Girls in the Salem Witch Trials

October 17, 2023June 6, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

In the months between February 1692 to May 1693, nineteen citizens of Salem, Massachusetts (14 women and 5 men) were executed for the charge of being a witch. One person was tortured to death for refusing to admit he was a witch, and five people died in jail after being accused. More than 200 people were accused in what we now call the Salem Witch Trials, and five dogs. As harrowing as it is to believe that a small American village executed twenty of its citizens, Europe executed up to 80,000 between 1500 and 1660.

History.com writes that the hysteria swirling around Salem, Massachusetts began in “January 1692, [when a] 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming.” Even though the medical community knew about ergotism, the residents did not know what afflicted these girls. The Parris family called in a doctor named William Griggs. Dr. Griggs could not diagnose the girls, and he declared their fits were “beyond epileptic or natural disease”. Dr. Griggs fell prey to the very human condition that applied to their day, as much as it does to today, of filling in the blanks he couldn’t by suggesting that the girls were victims of a supernatural bewitching.

Based on that diagnosis the Parris family were distraught, and they decided to accuse three women of bewitching their girls, including a woman named Tituba. After weighing the evidence against her, and the cultural climate surrounding Salem at the time, Tituba unknowingly set a precedent for those who would be accused in the future by confessing to “the crime” of bewitching. She confessed, we can only surmise, because she knew the deck was stacked against her, and she would be convicted regardless. In her confession, Tituba implicated others by saying that they worked alongside her in the service of the devil against the Puritans. Seeing how Tituba beat the system by providing states evidence, as it were, future accused witches confessed to similar charges to avoid execution and/or imprisonment, and they, too, began assisting the state by informing on other witches. Hysteria spread throughout the Salem community, and the local justice system was soon overwhelmed.

There were a number of factors surrounding Salem at the time to add to the culture of fear, including the fear of neighboring communities, fear of attacks from Native American tribes, and what historians call “The Little Ice Age” that destroyed their economy and many elements of their daily life. To explain what they considered inexplicable, the residents of Salem turned, in fear, to the supernatural, witches, and the devil to explain why their lives were destroyed.

Amid this culture of fear, four other young girls, all between ages nine to twenty, began accusing their neighbors of witchcraft. The six girls were commonly referred to as the afflicted girls. The afflicted girls would accuse, testify in court, and drop to the floor in convulsions during the witch trials. There are a number of theories regarding why these six girls did what they did to lead to public executions, but the one thing we now know with absolute certainty, with no facts to bolster that certainty, is that they were not lying or faking the convulsions.

One of the most wide-spread modern theories to explain the ailment the Parris and Williams girls suffered from is ergotism. Ergotism, or ergot poisoning is a result of a long-term ingestion of ergot alkaloids, or mold, that can be found on rye, wheat, and other cereals, which were all primary components of the diet of Salem residents. In the list of symptoms of Ergotism is delusions, hallucinations, vomiting and muscle spasms that could lead to convulsions, which many say lines up with the symptoms the Parris and Williams girls experienced.

As with any theory of matters that have occurred nearly three hundred years ago, historians have debunked this theory. Historians Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb argue if the young girls were victims of ergot poisoning why weren’t there more cases in Salem, and why wasn’t the rest of their family in their homes afflicted? The two historians admit that ergotism only takes place in hosts suffering from a vitamin A deficiency, but they state that Salem was rich with cows and their milk, so they conclude that it isn’t possible for a resident of Salem to suffer a vitamin A deficiency. They do not include the possibility that these two girls did not enjoy the taste of milk, so they didn’t drink it. They also do not include the possibility that the girls suffered from underlying conditions, such as bleeding stomach ulcers or some form of malnourishment that could’ve led to a greater susceptibility to ergotism via the ergot alkaloids. Nor do they consider the general idea that funguses and mold can affect individuals in the same house, with the same genes, different, based on varying underlying conditions.

Another theory is that the four girls who followed the Parris girls may have suffered from a psychogenic illness called mass hysteria in which one exhibits symptoms and another, unconsciously, begins exhibiting the same symptoms.

“We’ll probably never know the truth of what happened to these girls,” one person, with alleged authority on the subject suggests, “but the one thing we know is they weren’t faking it.”

One quick read through the history of the Salem Witch Trials can lead the reader to some impulsive reactions and cynical, knee-jerk assumptions. Those of us who want to know the truth, try very hard not to fall prey to our own biases, so we keep reading and researching. We do find out we’re wrong, on occasion, but more often than not, we read through all the thoughts and theories on the matter, and we find a whole lot of overthinking, until we fall back on our all-too-simplistic assumption that the afflicted girls made false accusations and they faked their convulsions.

All of the theories about what caused the girls to go into convulsions are not just possible, they’re probable, but the certainty some display in the face of what happened is what draws us back to our impulsive and cynical guesses. If we can rule out ergotism and mass hysteria, with no proof, how can we rule out the idea that they were lying and faking? Especially when one of them, Mary Warren, admitted that “afflicted persons did but dissemble,” or fake their symptoms. Now we know that Ms. Warren later recanted and accused those who might have pressured her into making the admission, but she provided the only evidence for any of the primary theories.

Another crucial element that leads me to believe that the afflicted girls were faking it, was the timing of their convulsions. We weren’t there for the proceedings, of course, and we don’t have the minutes of the trial, but the historical recreations lead us to assume that the convulsions the afflicted girls experienced in the courtroom were conveniently timed to convince the judges of the accused’s guilt. When Mary Warren was asked, in court, to clarify her statement that “afflicted persons did but dissemble,” or fake their symptoms, the afflicted girls in the courtroom went into convulsions. Mary Warren responded, on the stand, by going into her own convulsions. This fits the definition of mass hysteria, provided above, but it doesn’t explain the case for ergotism, and it could be argued that it only bolsters the cynical argument that they were all faking it.

One of the reasons, I think, that we seek to nullify the claim that they were lying and faking, is that it’s almost too horrific to imagine that anyone would purposely, and maliciously make a claim that leads to the executions of those they accuse. Cynical types, who impulsively believe the worst of humanity, often have no proof for their assertions, but those who impulsively believe everything is more complicated than all that don’t either.

One of the causes historians list as a cause for the Salem Witch Trials is the fear of the powerful women. To say full-grown women were second class citizens in 1692-93 Salem, Massachusetts, is being generous, and whatever power women had in Salem, young women had even less. Is it possible that these young women enjoyed their brief moment in the Sun? Not possible? Too cynical?

The next point that most historians consider to bolster their claim that the patriarchy feared and loathed strong women, is that they wanted to keep them in a state of fear. This is plausible, because while the Puritans of Salem considered women equal before God, they considered them more susceptible to the wickedness of the Devil. They suggested the later based on the story of Eve falling prey to the temptation of eating the apple in the garden of Eden. These characterizations are all unfortunately true, but while the thrust of the campaign might have been engineered by men, for men, it may not have gained a foothold in the culture were it not for the accusations made by the young girls. It’s also worth noting that five men were executed, and there is a list of men who were named, accused, imprisoned, and otherwise had their names sullied.

We’ll never know the truth, and I’m not saying I know better than anyone else, but when someone tells me that one theory is categorically false, without any evidence to back that claim up, my mind immediately invites those possibilities in.

“Think about it,” we say when someone else is so muddled in their thoughts that they can’t see straight. We might say that when someone is so blinded by simple truths that they can’t see the evidence that complicates the matter. We also say it when someone’s conclusion is so clouded by evidence that they sift and sort through it to develop speculation that complicates the matter so much they can’t see a simple truth. The simple truth of the matter is supernatural witches with supernatural powers do not exist. They might exist in a realm we don’t understand, but how often do we use otherworldly spirits to explain the gaps in our understanding of the human mind? We wonder, how can one man kill another with no feeling, he must be a monster, a vampire, a werewolf, or something else supernatural, because no normal man would kill another without reason. We can also use them to explain how a seemingly normal person can somehow fail to generate a sympathetic response to the aftermath of blind rage. It was the nature of residents of Salem, Massachusetts to blame supernatural spirits and monsters to explain what they could not explain then, it’s human nature now, and it probably always will be, because “We’ve seen things that no one can explain.”

We make fun of the people who lived over three hundred years ago for believing in such things, but my bet is that for the next three hundred years we’ll continue to believe someone, somewhere exhibits such powers. The only problem is that over the course of the last couple thousand years, we have yet to find substantial proof of it. Supernatural witches, and their Specters, a fancy term they used for spirits, ghosts, or demonic forces that the accused would allegedly sic on the victim don’t exist in the same manner that vampires, Frankenstein’s monster and Spongebob Squarepants don’t exist.

Harry Markopolos Tried to Take Down the Madoff Monster

January 12, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

Investment advisors suggest that if we only worked half as hard trying to figure out how and where to invest our money as we did to earn it, we would be better off. It’s sound advice, but how much quality homework can we do when our resources in the media and watchdogs in the government are either inept or in awe of financial “genius”? Some reports suggest that the SEC sent second rate investigators to examine the books of books of Bernie Madoff, and that they may have accepted Madoff’s excuse that his trading strategies involved “proprietary information”. As we all know now, his proprietary strategies involved not making trades. How could anyone in the media, or the SEC, know that? Well, as the man who “discovered” the fraud, Harry Markopolos said, “They could’ve called people. They could’ve called the people in banks and the traders Bernie claimed to have trading relationships.” Why didn’t they make a few calls? As Shortform.com suggests, concerned parties defaulted to the truth when they examined Madoff, and the truth suggested that a fund worth around $3-$7 billion just couldn’t be fraudulent.

Madoff also sold educated insiders responsible for money in charities, pension funds, and hedge funds digging through his numbers and asking numerous questions, saying, “If you have to ask, maybe this isn’t for you,” which surely elicited a “Hold on, hold on, we’re just trying to do our due diligence for out customers here. Please, get insulted” type response. This pitch appealed to numerous banks and financial firms including, The Fairfield Greenwich investment Group, Sonja Kohn, Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, and many other esteemed luminaries in their field. These pitches led to a mysterious enigma that gained Madoff a reputation as a guru of Wall Street, and he used it to intimidate the referees in the SEC to avoid investigating him, and when they eventually did investigate him, they did so with the same truth-default. The only person who wasn’t duped, and tried to get the SEC to shut it all down was the could’ve been, should’ve been hero of this tale, Harry Markopolos, who “discovered” the Madoff swindle nearly a decade before Madoff’s Ponzi scheme folded under its own weight.

Harry Markopolos was an expert at analyzing and managing quantitative data (a quant), a math nerd, an obscure financial analyst, and a fraud investigator who worked for Rampart Trading Management, one of Bernie Madoff’s competitors. His entry into the unfolding drama began when his Rampant boss, Frank Casey, learned that one of their firm’s biggest investors, Access International Advisors (AIA) was pulling their money out of Rampart and putting it all into a hedge fund headed up by respected financial guru Bernie Madoff. AIA CEO Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet informed Casey that he was doing so based on the incredible returns Madoff’s fund was producing. Upset that he couldn’t prevent Villehuchet from leaving, Casey instructed Markopolos to reverse-engineer Madoff’s trading strategy and revenue streams so Rampart could duplicate his results.

“It took me five minutes to know that [Madoff’s hedge fund] was a fraud,” Harry Markopolos said, after conducting his own investigation. “It took me another almost four hours of mathematical modeling to prove that it was a fraud.”

Markopolos wasn’t the first to “discover” Madoff’s fraud, but he pursued the SEC for an investigation when no one else could? The question is why? If you watch the YouTube video of Markopolos “Assessing the Madoff Ponzi Scheme and Regulatory Failures”, it will take you about five minutes to know Harry Markopolos is a nerd. We can probably all beat a nerd to the women, and we might be able to make them look foolish in sports, but don’t try to beat a nerd at math. Markopolos has confessed many times, in roundabout ways, that when he set about trying to reverse-engineer Madoff’s incredibly consistent returns, he took it personal.

“[Madoff] was stealing from me, he was stealing customers from me, and if you steal from a Greek, we will come after you,” Markopolos said in an interview. He didn’t say geek, he said Greek, but the rule still applies: “If you try to beat a geek, at their geeky games, they’ll come after you.”

Some might view this characterization of Harry Markopolos as disparaging, but it’s not intended that way. A true math nerd doesn’t care about success, wealth, imperiousness, a reclusive nature, or any of the mysterious characteristics that the rest of find so alluring. The rest of us can be duped by narratives, sex appeal, and charisma, but to a math nerd the universe doesn’t make sense, until we insert numbers and mathematical equations. If someone in the media, and the SEC, was brave enough to heed Markopolos’ detailed findings, 37,000 individuals from 136 different countries they could’ve spared a lot of pain and suffering in the world.

“I’ve taken all the calculus courses, from integral calculus through differential calculus, as well as linear algebra. And statistics, both normal and non-normal,” Markopolos said. Madoff didn’t care for Harry Markopolos-types poking around in his “proprietary” investment strategy, “and look at the results the man produces,” the uninformed probably argued, “you can’t argue with results.” Harry Markopolos could, in his numbers world, and in that world, Madoff’s success in the options trading market made no sense to him.

“As we know, markets go up and down, and his only went up. He had very few down months. Only four percent of the months were down months. And that would be equivalent to a baseball player in the major leagues batting .960 for a year. Clearly impossible. You would suspect cheating immediately.”

“Maybe he was just good,” CBS’ Steve Kroft remarked in a 60 Minutes interview.

“No one’s that good,” Markopolos said.

In his opening statement before a Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises, Harry Markopolos assessed the Madoff Ponzi scheme and the regulatory failures by the SEC that contributed to the Madoff scheme amassing more than $43 billion dollars of innocent victims’ money between his first report to the SEC and the scheme eventually falling due to the 2008 financial crisis.

Markopolos also stated that if the SEC followed through on his report on Madoff’s scheme in May of 2000 with a thorough investigation, the SEC would’ve found fraudulent activity in the range of $3-$7 billion dollars of investors’ money. He submitted another report to the SEC in October 2001, when the damage to investors would’ve been in the $12-$20 billion dollar range, and in 2005 he submitted a report with a detailed listing of 29 red flags that occurred when the Madoff fund was worth $30 billion. He submitted two more reports in 2007 and 2008. Markopolos concludes this portion of his opening statement, saying, “A fraud that should’ve been stopped at in May 2000 at under $7 Billion has now grown to $50 billion.” (Some have since listed the fraud as high as $65 billion.)

“In your first letter to the S.E.C. back in 2000, you’re a little tentative. You say, ‘Look, I have no hard evidence, no smoking gun,’” CBS News Steve Kroft observed in the 60 Minutes interview.

“In 2000, it was more theoretical. In 2001, it was a little bit more real. By 2005, I had 29 red flags that you just couldn’t miss on. By 2005, the degree of certainty was approaching 100 percent,” Markopolos explained.

As the 60 Minutes interview between Steve Kroft and Markopolos further reveals there were a lot more insiders who knew, or suspected, Madoff was not completely on the level. As the CBS News article states, “Over time and with some simple math calculations, Markopolos concluded that for Madoff to execute the trading strategy he said he was using he would have had to buy more options on the Chicago Board Options Exchange than actually existed, yet he says no one he spoke to there remembered making a single trade with Bernard Madoff’s fund.”

“I would talk to the people I had trading relationships with and ask, ‘Did you have a trading relationship with Mr. Bernard Madoff?’ And they all said, ‘No. We don’t think he’s for real,’” Markopolos said.

“Markopolos said he found no one who ever had traded with Madoff. “And I traded with some of the largest equity derivatives firms in the world.”

“And that’s because Madoff’s investment fund never actually made any trades, at least going back to 1993, and probably further – a fact confirmed at a meeting of Madoff investors by the trustee charged with liquidating Madoff’s assets. No one knew the depth of the fraud but a lot of people had questions.”

“Who else figured this out besides you?” Kroft asked.

“I would say that hundreds of people suspected something was amiss with the Madoff operation. If you look at who the victims were not, you’ll notice that the major firms on Wall Street had no money with Mr. Madoff,” Markopolos said.

“I’m quoting from the letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, red flag number 20. ‘Madoff is suspected of being a fraud by some of the world’s largest, most sophisticated financial services firms.’ And then you list some of the firms,” Kroft said. “The biggest firms on Wall Street. And conversations with people high up in those firms.”

“That is correct. And the SEC ignored that,” Markopolos said. “All the SEC had to do was pick up the phone. They never did.”

“If you had executives at the biggest investment houses on Wall Street that knew something was wrong, why do you think they didn’t go to the SEC?” Kroft asked.

“Because people in glass houses don’t throw stones. And self-regulation on Wall Street doesn’t work,” Markopolos said.

In January 2006 the New York office of the Securities and Exchange Commission finally opened a case file to look into Markopolos’ allegations about Bernie Madoff. Despite uncovering evidence that Madoff had mislead them about his investment activities, the SEC closed the case 11 months later without ever opening a formal investigation. The staff said there was “no evidence of fraud.”

“What I found out from my dealings with the SEC over eight and a half years is that their people are totally untrained in finance; they’re unschooled; they’re un-credentialed. Most of them are just merely lawyers without any financial industry experience,” Markopolos said.

“Well, if the people there aren’t trained in securities work, what are they trained in?” Kroft asked.

“How to look at pieces of paper that the securities laws require. They can check every piece of paper perfectly and find misdemeanors, and they’ll miss all the financial felonies that are occurring because they never look there,” Markopolos replied. “Even when pointed to fraud, they’re incapable of finding fraud.”

No one at the SEC would talk to 60 Minutes on the record about Markopolos’ allegations. But one person who seemed to have had a high opinion of the agency was Bernie Madoff.

“I’m very close with the regulators so I’m not trying to say that what they do is bad. As a matter of fact, my niece just married one,” Madoff said in 2007.

Besides his niece’s husband, who left the SEC last year, Madoff had longstanding ties to agency and was called upon to give advice. At a 2007 meeting of a non-profit group called The Philoctetes Center, he seemed to think the SEC was doing a great job.

“In today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules. This is something that the public really doesn’t understand. But it’s impossible for a violation to go undetected, certainly not for a considerable period of time,” Madoff said.

No one other than Bernie Madoff and some members of his executive staff, should be blamed in the beginning. In the beginning of his fraudulent activity, which Madoff stated began in the 1990’s, we can forgive the media and the SEC for not investigating his activity, but at some point the truth-default should’ve faltered. At some point, and go ahead and take Harry Markopolos and all of his detailed reports out for a moment, those suspicious of Madoff’s documented 20-year history of nonstop gains should’ve prompted reverse-engineer inspections from members of the media, the financial community, and our employees in the SEC should’ve dropped their views of the Chairman of the Nasdaq and investigated him properly. We can only guess that when competitors and regulators went through Bernie Madoff’s books, they kept looking up at the name on the masthead. We can also guess that if any of their underlings spotted some level of chicanery, the higher ups in the office decided against risking their reputations on uncovering a man considered the genius of Wall Street. For varying reasons, including the competitive nature of losing one of their most profitable and most loyal clients, the higher ups at Rampart Investment Management decided to let Markopolos go to the SEC with his findings. As we’ve witnessed with what happened at FTX, a certain level of financial chicanery keeps happening in this country, and the media and government agencies are constantly caught with their pants down.