Wednesday, September 15, 2021

One more artificial body part

installed.  Now some time to find out how it settles in.

Anybody who whines about the word 'being worse than ever' is an idiot.  Who should be transported back to, say 1000 A.D., to find out just how wonderful those times were.

Enjoy smallpox and no antibiotics and so forth, moron.

3 comments:

Ed said...

I don’t know which artificial body part you received, but I thank the cow that gave its life for my new heart valve. Good luck recovering. Think physical therapy. You won’t regret it.

Firehand said...

Should have specified, cataract surgery.

markm said...

Half of the kings and queens in history died of something that could have been cleared up with an antibiotic. Give Jane Seymour antibiotics after she delivered an heir to the throne, and Henry VIII may have remained happily married to her the rest of the life, with more sons, one of whom might have lived and carried on the Tudor line. Give Richard the Lionheart a shot of penicillin after the crossbow bolt was inexpertly removed from his shoulder, and the Plantagenet Empire might still be ruling Europe.

IIRC, only 5 American Presidents died in office, and antibiotics might have saved three of them: William Henry Harrison (pneumonia), and Garfield and McKinley (infections after bullets that failed to kill them were removed). But the smallpox vaccine and sanitation in the form of sewage systems and clean drinking water each saved many more lives than all antibiotics and antiseptics combined.

Aside from medicine, most of the world is immensely richer than 1,000 years ago, or even 100 years ago. The richest man in the world in 1921 could not cross the Atlantic in less than two or three weeks, or go NYC to San Francisco in less than about 3 days. He could send telegrams around much of the world, but could not pick up the telephone in his Manhattan office and dial a number past the NYC suburbs. (Most people didn't have a telephone at all and considered telegraphs very expensive.) Poor people used to be skinny, and business magnates were often so big they had to be transported by rail; now it's the other way around, because anyone with food stamps can buy all the empty calories he wants, but the rich don't want to look like _them_.