Thanksgiving Advent, Day Fourteen: Modern Health

[swan_tower]

When la_marquise_de_ and I were doing the podcast thing at World Fantasy, one of the things that came up was the sheer physical discomfort people used to live with as a matter of course.

Now, I know that there are many people ven now -- possibly some of you reading this -- who likewise live with chronic pain, disease, injury, disability, or other such conditions. I have no desire to trivialize those things. But taking the long perspective . . . my god. Things have improved so much in the last century or so, I can barely even conceive of it.

I'm talking about everything from the major achievements (smallpox used to kill or disfigure vast numbers of people; now it's been eradicated) down to the minor ones (most of us still have all our teeth, and they're probably pretty straight, too). Thanks to vaccinations -- but no thanks to the anti-vax movement, which I won't rant about here because this is supposed to be about thankfulness -- we no longer have to run the gauntlet of measles and mumps and rubella and whooping cough and everything else that used to drop children like flies. We have antibiotics: no more "and by the way he spent the last three years of life with a supperating ulcer in his thigh" for us! We can repair torn ligaments, use hearing aids to combat deafness, replace freaking hip joints, man. If I didn't have astigmatism, or U.S. had approved toric ICLs already, I could get a lens permanently implanted in my eye to correct my vision.

Dude, Beck Weathers lost his nose to frostbite, and they grew a new one for him on his forehead.

So while I extend my heartfelt sympathies to everyone who suffers from ill-health of one kind or another -- my GOD am I thankful for modern health. If you threw me into the European past, I would not want to be treated by any doctor from before maybe 1940 or so. (I don't know enough about the history of medicine in other parts of the world to make judgment calls there, except to say that Europe was late to the smallpox-vaccination party.) I'm sure any number of things we do today will be considered barbaric and dumb by the people of the future, but from where I'm standing, we've made amazing progress.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I can pretty much point at my eyes and leave it there. My vision has been going bad since I was seven; I would probably have been run over by a brewer's waggon before I was fifteen, and that would be the end of me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My eyes are pretty much the same, only from nine instead of seven. But I got pneumonia at seven, and when I was born, my mother had a bleeding problem that was a tedious thing for them to handle in 1978 and would probably have killed her in 1878. Would I have survived my first six months without a mother? Some babies did. Many didn't.

Go modern medicine.

[maratai.livejournal.com]

This. I was wearing glasses in kindergarten (when my parents could force me to put them on). The vision issue would have killed me before anything else had time to come into play.