stephan.com
scattered thoughts

I just read some comments on Slashdot I found interesting, summarizing something I’ve said for a while… (mostly here for my reference)

Jaguars weren’t a problem in the 1780’s or the 1530’s, but staph was. So were tuberculosis, tularemia, scurvy, plague, scarlet fever, pneumonia, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria.

Hell, we don’t even have to go back 100 years. Today, the rate of infant mortality is about 8 per 1,000 live births. In the 1940’s, just 60 years ago, it was nearly six times that.

Let’s put it this way: throughout human history from about 300,000 years ago to just very recently, the leading causes of death have been trauma and infectious disease.

Only in the past century has the trend shifted. Today, the leading causes of death in the developed world are all chronic diseases: heart disease, diabetes, cancer. (Statistically, you’re still quite likely to die from some kind of trauma, but if you look at all trauma, today you’re far more likely to survive an injury that would have killed you even just 20 years ago. God bless the emergency room.)

Do you know what would happen to you if you broke your arm in 1900? Which, incidentally, you’d be far more likely to do, because you would have had far less calcium in your diet, and your bones would have been far weaker. If you broke your arm and you were very lucky, you would merely be crippled for life. Your barber–unless you were one of the relatively few people who lived in or very near a big city, your barber would be your sole source of medical assistance–would reduce the fracture badly, and the absence of anything like a cast would guarantee that it would not set properly. The result would be a permanent disability.

If you were slightly less lucky, your fracture would be a compound one. Your wound would get infected. Your barber would tie a piece of not-altogether-clean cloth around your upper arm, then use a short piece of wood to twist the cloth until it constricted your brachial artery. Then he would cut through the muscles, nerves, vessels, and ligaments in your arm until he reached the bone, and then saw through the bone. Meanwhile, you’re unable to scream because you’ve got a piece of rawhide stuck in your mouth, and you’re unable to reach out because three strong men are holding you down. The blood that was trapped in your arm spills out onto the sawdust-covered floor; later, that blood-soaked sawdust will be swept up, lofting whatever dire pathogens you might have been host to into the air.

Of course, if you were only slightly less lucky than that, you’d simply lapse into sepsis and die.

Don’t be so arrogant. Only about four generations separate us from a standard of living that many of us would find to be just barely above proto-humans scrabbling around in the dust.