Factual veracity of this article[edit]

The blog post [1] may be of interest to editors of this article; in particular, it calls into question many of the (reliably sourced!) claims in the article. (It is obviously not usable as a reliable source, but perhaps it provides some basis for identifying other sources.) --JBL (talk) 01:39, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Good point. I did some digging on the track figures and added some clarifying material in that section. I also added some language to the patient size section to express that the numbers came from the obituary and may not be accurate. I didn't look hard for and didn't find any sources on Bonine that would do a better job of expressing how popular he was without hyperbole (note that the work in the blog post seems correct, but translating that into what I would put here would qualify, IMO, as original research). Smmurphy(Talk) 15:44, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]


I wrote the blog post linked above. There is no record anywhere of Bonine running a time of 10.8 in an 110-yard race until 40 years after the fact, when newspaper articles generated by publicity for the projected Dempsey-Wills fight in 1926 made this claim. How those articles count as "reliable sources" is unclear.

The fastest time anyone ever claimed Bonine ran prior to the publicity blurbs 40 years later was 11.0. This time was not accepted by as legitimate by the compilers of unofficial world records -- official records via the ITAF did not exist prior to 1912 -- so Bonine was never credited with any kind of record in the world of track and field.

The claims regarding how many patients he saw are wildly improbable on their face, as I point out in the blog post, but are not as conclusively debunked by examining the extant historical record.2601:281:8180:B0:2858:91ED:458C:4E59 (talk) 05:37, 2 February 2022 (UTC)Paul Campos[reply]

Hi Paul, thanks for your message. (I'm a long-time reader of LGM.) I'm glad you were able to find your way over here. This case presents a structural weakness of Wikipedia: if someone gets a bunch of nonsense written about them in reputable sources, and then that's debunked in a blog-post, the various sourcing guidelines the community has developed over the years push heavily in favor of using the (wrong, even ridiculous) reliably sourced material rather than the (correct) blog debunking. In addition to raising the question here and with the creator of the article, I've also posted a message at one of WP's noticeboards in the hope of drawing the attention of a larger group of editors. --JBL (talk) 12:24, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Looking at the Independent, its possible to classify that as self-sourced as it may be an interview. However, it also contradicts the million patients as it says "hundreds a year" The Montreal article also questions his earliest time. Need to do more digging but I think there's enough contradiction in the sources that extraordinary claims could be removed or minimized (perhaps discussing without making part of the lede and with attribution/qualification) Slywriter (talk) 14:29, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Has anybody ever bothered to actually run the numbers to see how absurdly implausible it is that any doctor could ever directly treat 1.5 million patients over the course of their career? The article says that his career spanned "nearly 40 years". Let's go ahead and give him the full 40 and see how this works out. In order to treat 1.5 million unique patients, this doctor would have needed to see 37,500 new patients every single year of his career. Let's assume this guy was a real workhorse and put in 60 hours a week, every single week, for 40 straight years without ever once taking any time off for anything. That's more than 12 patients per hour, every hour of every workday, with no breaks for the restroom and no meals. And also no repeat patients, ever. It's not plausible. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DTG.stl.314 (talkcontribs) 19:54, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Belated, but I disagree that the blog post is unusable. The key thing about blog posts is who wrote them - a random person on the Internet, or someone without expertise? Paul Campos has their own Wikipedia article, and I think we can unironically say that he's produced the majority of 21st century literature on Fred Bonine scholarship. Given that he appears to have actually researched the issue rather than made stuff up, I'd argue that the blog post is citable directly in this article, and can be used to call out certain claims as unlikely. (More generally, extraordinary claims require extraordinary sources - if we had local newspaper articles from 1920 about how some Iowa obstetrician could walk on water, we wouldn't necessarily just report that unadorned.) SnowFire (talk) 09:59, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]