Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
Another short chapter from Cloudy with a Risk of Children. Not sure how prolific authors manage to reel off book after book after book, while fitting in everyday life… they’ve access to tricks of the trade which I don’t have, I suppose.
Nonetheless, I’m making progress; ten chapters complete, a host of others partially complete — so a bit of momentum at least.
Below, one of the completed chapters, on how we delighted in the discovery of antibiotics — and them promptly abused them.
Full excerpt is viewable by paid subscribers, as a thank you to those who help me justify the time I spend in this space.
As always, feedback welcome… it’s all a draft until the book gets printed :)
A Tale of Two Kiddies
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
— Charles Dickens
The opening lines to Dickens” A Tale of Two Cities capture one of that classic tale’s major themes: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
True then, true now. There’s no question that things have changed dramatically since Dickens’ time, especially when it comes to longevity. But even though we live a heck of a lot longer, people are people… the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So why do we stick around on this green planet for so long these days, on average for 80 years compared to the meager 40 years the plebs of Dickens’ day could expect?
Three main reasons:
First, vaccines. You probably know the story of Edward Jenner and smallpox: Jenner observed that milkmaids who contracted cowpox tended not to get ravaged by smallpox. So he inoculated folks with bits of cowpox, and lo and behold they too were protected from smallpox. That’s the deep root of the vaccination industry; and now vaccinations protect us from all manner of nasty infections that used to plague our ancestors, such as diphtheria, polio, meningococcus, pneumococcus, tetanus, and Haemophilus.
Vaccines have fallen into disrepute of late, sadly, thanks to the ham-fisted manner in which a pandemic-addled medical profession handled the roll-out and administration of Covid vaccines. Millions of otherwise sensible folks now question the utility and safety of all vaccines — “vaccine hesitancy” is the order of the day. Perhaps a small dusting of polio or smallpox is in order… that’d bring people back ‘round.
The second reason we stopped dying so young — arguably more important, even, than vaccines — is because of public sanitation and personal hygiene. We learned to wash our hands! The dude who got that ball rolling was Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who figured out that if he washed his hands between cases while delivering babies, mothers didn’t die.
When Semmelweiss shared his eureka! moment with his peers he was laughed out of town, naturally. He ended his days in an insane asylum, where is where he died — not of ridicule, but from complications of a gangrenous hand. You read that right: the Maestro of Clean Hands died from an infected hand — thus was birthed the term “cruel irony”.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Ruminations to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.