Doctors still do this, at least in Germany. When you’re a smoker and getting pregnant, your doctor will most likely not try to bully you into quitting, instead they inform you about the risks and recommend you to cut down the smoking to a minimum but they will also acknowledge that you will most likely not overcome your addiction while your body is already under a lot of stress.
This is exactly the point many people don’t understand: People in the past were not less intelligent than today’s people.
We developed more ways to discover stuff and more precise tools to measure and detect things and of course with computers we got the ability to handle extremely complex data. All of this gives us an edge over past people science wise but we had very capable thinkers 200, 600 and 4000 years ago. All basic principles of mathematics have been developed a long time ago.