What improvements do we have to survive against the plague compared to in the past? I'm curious to understand the difference
But they did eventually connect plague outbreaks to rats, and killed the rats in the name of public health.
Today we have very effective antibiotics, better knowledge of the body to offer supportive care, and even knowledge about how the plague is transmitted so we can have more effective public health actions.
The implied condescension hits hard after the Covid masking debacle.
Covidian sympathetic magic (wear a strip of cloth over your mouth but not your nose to appease the germ gods) doesn't.
Frankly, I’m sad masks aren’t still more of a thing. I don’t want to wear one all the time, but if you’re sick and need to be in a public place, throw one on out of consideration for your peers.
I thought about making a comment on essential oils in my original comment, but chickened out.
The thing with the masks is exactly the same as if public shopping efficiency authorities had consistently put out the large-scale message that “bags” work to carry groceries but conflating mesh bags with non-perforated bags; Yes, mesh bags do tend to get upwards of 30% of the objects you purchase to your home. There’s an underlying insult to common sense and people are actually not stupid.
Likewise, I would add "obviously": I have never seen "obvious" used to describe anything which is obvious, only things which are not.
The phrase "common sense" is even worse, as about half the time it points to claims that are in fact false.
So, in this case, surgical masks: you say it's "obvious" they're not good enough and compare them to a mesh bag. Perhaps they are that bad, but it's not obvious, and "common sense"* suggests to me that surgeons, who are necessarily working with unwell and often immunocompromised people, will desire something that doesn't let one of the surgical team put a random bacterial mix into someone's new kidney when they sneeze.
* I am aware of the irony; and yes, despite this I can also name a famous example where surgeons collectively were very wrong
I chose my words carefully. Those are actually the right words.
It is plainly obvious and indisputable that the academic record shows a swath of scientifically acquired data on aerosol transmission and masks-which-do-not-gape-at-the-sides. This basis would have informed a completely different approach and result to public health authorities’ education and emission of sensible information to raise common sense to an ethical standard, if public health authorities operated… non-debacularly, to choose a word.
If they had operated responsibly.
Years ago, I read a roleplaying book ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkworld ) that had a throwaway comment that many ancient civilizations had decent medical care for injuries, but good care for disease was much less common. Ancient Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, Mayans, and others mastered various forms of surgery. They even recognized that some materials (such as silver staples) were better for closing wounds because they would be less likely to get infected.
But disease was always much harder to understand. It's usually hard to tell if somebody got better because of treatment, or because they were just going to get better ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_touch ), and (sadly) if everybody got the same treatment, it wasn't always obvious when the treatment killed people ( https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e... : George Washington died because he received drastic treatment for a sore throat; including having a doctor remove about half of the blood in his body. People at the time didn't realize that the treatment was the problem, they just believed that sore throats were incredibly dangerous ("George Washington then called for Tobias Lear. Lear recorded that Washington told him, '... I believed from the first that the disorder would prove fatal'")).
I honestly once thought it would be cool to have a TV series based on the Knights Hospitallers, but realized they’d just be bleeding people in every episode (different time period, same idea: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/chirugeon ). Our understanding of germs is very recent. The 1896 book “The Chemistry of Cookery” ( https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53458 ) says “I should add that this germ theory of disease is disputed by some who maintain that the source of the diseases attributed to such microbia is chemical poison, the microbia (i.e. little living things) are merely accidental, or creatures fed on the disease-producing poison.” That is, even at the end of the 1800s, whether bacteria caused illness was still disputed.
During the black death, the people did the best they could with the knowledge they had. But we can do better with the knowledge we have, and that's easy to prove based on comparing modern recovery rates to what they were in Europe in the 1300s. It would be depressing if medical science hadn’t improved in the last 700 years.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/plague-do...
(I am making popcorn, in preparation for the inevitable administration schism and late night TweetRants between the "ban masks at all costs because what about her emails" and "profiteer from selling plague masks to the CDC under contracts bought with campaign donations" factions. I predict red plague masks with MAGA logos.)
How the hell humanity managed to last so long without antibiotics is mindboggling.
I can't find a reference to it now, though, and if there was a term for the exaggerated response I don't remember it.
It's possible that my memory confused a harsher fever response to normal illnesses with familial mediterranean fever:
https://www.genome.gov/news/news-release/genomic-variation-c...
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-bla...