I finished two books (both of them Directed Readings books - students chose them) over break.

The first is Roy Porter's huge "To the Benefit of Mankind." It is a history of medicine, literally starting with ancient Egypt and going (almost) to present-day. (I think Porter wrote it around 1998, and on the back cover he's identified as "the late Roy Porter" so the book is a few years old).

It's interesting. And once again, makes me grateful I live in an era of:

1. tetanus vaccine. You really, really do not want to contract tetanus.

2. polio vaccine. Ditto. Though I already kind of knew this, because some of my older female relatives had young children during the "polio summers" of the 40s and 50s and they talked about how fearful they were.

3. antibiotics. I actually might not be here today if it were not for antibiotics - I've had scarletina, I've had several bouts of strep, I've had multiple ear infections - any of which, had it been the 1800s, could have carried me off in childhood, but because we live in the times we do, I could go back to school in a couple days after taking the mold-derivatives known as antibiotics.

4. "Listerian" antiseptic measures. Seriously. Doctors didn't want to wash their hands in the past, because of a mixture of arrogance and the sense that it "made patients uncomfortable." And interestingly, one of the big pieces of evidence suggesting that microbes could be transferred on hands was the difference in maternal survival rates for mothers delivered by midwives vs. by "regular" doctors - survival was a lot higher for midwives because they weren't interacting with really sick patients (and also, I suspect, some midwives figured out the "clean hands, low infection" link on their own). Eventually the doctors came round to the suggestions that they clean their hands (and change their smocks) between patients.

5. Anesthesia. There's a harrowing passage written by the novelist Fanny Burney about having surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from her breast in the days before anesthesia. Also, a lot of surgeries that are life-saving now, were not possible before the days of anesthetic.

6. All the analgesics. Even aspirin was not widely used before the 1890s. I can't imagine dealing with migraines without something to dull the pain.

Another thing that Porter mentions, that strikes me as interesting, is the changing attitudes towards disease - in the very early times, it was seen as a punishment from God - either you or your parents had sinned. But as knowledge of disease became greater, as people began to realize the reality of contagion, ideas shifted, and in a way, illness became more "egalitarian" - a duchess was as likely as a pauper to be carried off by an infection; viral diseases struck fairly broad swaths of the population.

However, as we've conquered many infectious diseases, there does seem to be a swing back of the pendulum - the idea of "lifestyle medicine" and, even worse, the concept of the "cancer personality." The idea that maybe chronic diseases develop because of something the patient has done - or not done.

I'm not necessarily saying you should drink and smoke and all that - but I'm saying it seems terribly unfair to me to blame someone who gets cancer for having the "wrong attitude." Which I've actually seen some people do. And not only is it unfair, it's distinctly unhelpful. (And besides, of all the people I've seen who've contracted cancer, and just as much, all those I've seen beat it vs. not beat it - there is NO common personality trait I can see. So to "blame the victim" for their cancer is wrong and misguided and even kind of evil, in my mind).

But I do worry that "lifestyle medicine" will be the wave of the future- Porter writes of "bully[ing] people into health" and I think that's a thing that could happen - already we see it with the scare-stories about obesity or mothering behavior or diet or sleep patterns or WHATEVER. It's almost as if society is building up to be able to blame people for whatever goes wrong with their bodies - they ate too much, they ate the wrong things, they didn't sleep "right" - and so it's their "fault" they now have Type II Diabetes or cancer or congestive heart failure. And I suppose, in a dystopian future, it would be easier to write such people off, not provide them with care, because after all, "it's their fault."

Feh. I really don't want to live in a world where either every trip to the doctor for anything is accompanied with long lectures on food, sleep, exercise, and leisure habits, or, worse, to have some kind of a "card" where the foods I am "permitted" to buy for my body type and metabolism are recorded, and forget buying anything not on the "permitted" list.

But then again, I'm not sure I want the pendulum to swing back into a horror of unchecked infectious disease.

It's just, it seems that for many of us, we live in a time of unprecedented health - but instead of society being grateful for it, they look for new things to scare us about.

I'll talk about the other book - The Last Flight of the Red Macaw - later.