This almost sounds medieval to my ears. It’s kinda freighting how far we’ve gotten in merely 100 years.
https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demograph...
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortalit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...
Blood letting (and its foundation the four humors) was still a thing when the Curies discovered radium.
We have come a long way indeed.
I can totally imagine one of my gout-ridden relatives incidentally discovering that after losing a good chunk of blood (maybe a hunting accident, or a fuckup in a pottery workshop) that their foot stopped stabbing in pain. And then going "what else can I cure this way?".
And there's some new things that bloodletting is the only known treatment for. Like PFAS accumulation.
That's the difference. Bloodletting seems barbarous because it definitely didn't cure most things it was used for.
> PFAS accumulation
Highly overblown. People drink alcohol at quantities know to be carginogenic and we don’t have the histeria that we do about something in the ppb range.
Medieval? The 19th century was not a good place.
I do think it's in general a good idea to use such tools for better fits, shoes tend to focused more on narrow feet which is possibly a side effect of the shoes themselves. I have to stick to certain brands that cater towards wide feet. Perhaps in the future 3D printed shoes will be good enough that I can swap out my regular shoes for hyper-customized ones.
Solves the fit problem quickly and avoids any X-Ray exposure.
Kids can’t reliably tell you the fit of their shoes, and some footwear doesn’t yield to the “thumb-at-toe” test.
(1) https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/when-xrays-were-all-the-rage-a...
> [A patent radioactive medicine]’s most loyal customer was Eben Byers, well known in Pittsburgh society as a wealthy manufacturer, sportsman, and playboy, approaching fifty years of age. Byers continued to take Radithor more desperately each year as his health failed, until in 1931 he entered a hospital, feeble and emaciated, his very breath radioactive. He did not have time to develop cancer but died of direct radiation injury within a few months.
> This was the first proven case of death from a patent radioactive medicine ... The public was not easily convinced that radioactivity could be dangerous at all [...] Doctors of sound reputation continued to use heavy doses of radiation to treat not only serious ailments but also cosmetic problems like warts or excess facial hair. Some even offered men temporary birth control through X-ray sterilization. As late as 1940 many hospital and laboratory workers were casually exposing themselves to radiation at levels far above the official guidelines.
[...]
> During the 1950s X-rays were often used to kill unwanted body hair, thousands of fluoroscopes in shoe Stores across the United States and Europe showed people the bones in their children’s feet; some hospitals routinely X-rayed infants simply to please parents with an inside view of their offspring.
From "Nuclear Fear; a history of images"
It's only when you start refining and enriching natural things that they become really risky. Unfortunately thats what Curie did.
It’s a big factor, but not only. You don’t need to refine or enrich anything to have radon poisoning, for example.
Tunnels and caves could still be problematic though there’s a lot of gasses that can cause problems in such environments.