Friday, December 21, 2007

Longing for "The Good Old Days"

I've noticed a tendency for people to long for "The Good Old Days" when there were no fat people, and everyone was SO much healthier!

Here is a quote from a comment on Paul Campos' blog:
All Americans survived for hundreds of years with out health insurance and things worked just fine.


Survived? Sure. "Things worked just fine"? What do you mean by "fine", though? Are people really so unimaginative these days that they have no idea just how much they benefit from modern health technology, like vaccines and antibiotics?

We've eradicated smallpox, which killed almost half a billion people in the 20th century alone. In 1977, there were a quarter million crippled polio survivors in the United States.

Many conditions associated with malnutrition have also become very rare in the Western world. They could be eliminated in the entire world, if the geopolitical climate were different; we have the physical resources to do so, but getting them to those who need them has proven very difficult. I'm talking about rickets, scurvy, starvation, and birth defects that can be prevented by folic acid intake.

And, as a side note, I think it is arrogant to fret over what to do about fat people when there are still people in the world who don't have enough to eat.

We've also significantly reduced a number of illnesses that result from unsanitary conditions. Whether it's clean drinking water that won't give you dysentery, cholera, or giardia, or it's having your flesh wound cleaned out properly so it doesn't turn gangrenous, our modern knowledge of sanitation has been an incredible breakthrough for health.

We live in very different times now. We don't even think about many of these diseases that maimed and killed people for those magical hundreds of years without health insurance. Our big, scary diseases (cancer, heart disease) are ones associated with old age--because we are living longer than ever before.

I'd gladly send these folks back to live in the days before sanitation, vaccinations, and adequate food supplies to do "just fine". If dying from diarrhea, starvation, or a now-eliminated virus is "just fine", that is.

Recommended reading:

4 comments:

Harpy said...

Ooh! Ooh! That idea got into the BBC recently, as BABble posts about:

http://babble.sneakykitty.com/index.php/2007/12/19/better-to-be-eaten-by-wolves-than-be-fat/

Yes! Medieval peasants "probably" had a great, healthy diet better than our modern one! Except for all that lack of sanitation you mentioned. I mean, it's pretty well-established by historians and anthropologists that people (of all classes) did not in fact eat rotten meat with spices to cover up the rotten taste, but frankly peasants got all the unpleasant leftovers after the upper classes had taken the good stuff. And no one, rich or poor, had anywhere near a modern level of sanitation.

Also, have these people never seen The Gallery of Regrettable Food? And that's from the 50s-70s. :)

Thorny said...

Well, obviously not /all/ Americans survived without health insurance. After all, I remember hearing (though this could just be pre-urban legend) that some people didn't even give their children names until they'd survived their first year, infant mortality was so great.

And shall we even discuss maternal mortality rates? Women died in childbirth, or shortly thereafter all the freakin' time.

So sure, let's all go back to "the good old days" when the average life expectancy was what - 40 years? 50 at the outside?

And besides! Of course nobody needed health insurance - health care wasn't worth dick. All a doctor needed to stock his kit was a bottle of booze, some herbs out of the garden, a knife and a ratty bunch of cloth for bandages (the more stained/dirtier the better - don't want to ruin the good clean stuff, after all). Maybe a needle and some thread, too. It's not like they were doling out chemotherapy on the Wild Frontier or anything.

Jesus, I hate when people get all picky-choosy about which part of the good old days they want back and which they don't.

cynth said...

"And, as a side note, I think it is arrogant to fret over what to do about fat people when there are still people in the world who don't have enough to eat."

I think this bothers me more than the people who think those old tv shows like Leave it to Beaver reflect real life back in the day.


We need to end hunger in America, it's really sad that a country with so much cares so little about it's hungry and cares so much about it's fatties.

Andee said...

We need to end hunger in America, it's really sad that a country with so much cares so little about it's hungry and cares so much about it's fatties.

Or worse, thinks fatties are the reason for people going hungry -- i.e. we're so greedy we can't help but steal food from the poor. There are actually millions of people who believe this, and many of them really ought to know better.

Of course, considering the numbers of poor fat people out there would completely blow that theory out of the water. And so would the knowledge that if you only get to eat sometimes and thus your metabolism is shit from chronic starvation, that's a pretty good reason for a poor person being fat.

Andee (Meowser)