sawbones

Yeah, these people are just sawbones. Not statisticians.

Org/episodes/sawbones/sawbones-man-who-at... It goes a bit more in depth.

Calling one a "whore" should be like calling a physician a "sawbones", which is often not meant derogatively. > Without socially acceptable outlets ...

A very, very painfully misguided man, and I swear to you that the juice of a lime will never pass my lips—at least until the internal bleeding starts, and then I’m sure I will go along with whatever old sawbones says. And I definitely want access to that new experimental leech treatment.

Org/sawbones/sawbones-hysteria I hope this satisfies your question. I suspect I was just not clear enough that I was not legitimately suggesting hysteria as an actual explanation.

One might have thought that the opening sentence would be a pretty strong clue that this wasn't to be taken literally: I’m just a lowly seventeenth-century British sailor, not some fancy-pants seventeenth-century British sawbones It's not especially great satire, about on par of McSweeny's usual work. They occasionally aspire to genius, though mostly when they lean in to their academic audience and target them well.