OK guys, I have this thought or two about plastic and the way I can feel its creeping tendrils making connections to other parts of my brain makes me think this could get awful conspiracy real quick, so…you’ve been warned. If I had a time machine, I would take it to a time before plastic existed. I’ve thought this for a long time. So that’s not very far, right? Early 1900s I’m guessing? Because I know the early 1900s are when petroleum-based molecules were first being patented, because I know that that was when the anti-trust stuff was “breaking up” the Standard Oil monopoly, quotations because I think they just moved on to creating new monopolies - because that’s when the Carnegies sent Abraham Flexner to every single medical school in the US and Canada in order to write a report about them that was used to discredit and shutter every kind of school of medicine that wasn’t oriented around patentable-petroleum-based pharmaceuticals, and was backed by $100 million dollars of 1900s money to “help.” Because every kind of medicine until then wasn’t good.
Brilliant connections that you drew here. The connections you made make sense to me. And the "improvements" to birthing processes in the early 1900s - courtesy of a combination of the Flexner Report and Dr. Joseph DeLee - certainly did not improve birth outcomes, but worsened infant mortality over the course of the next several decades.
Depends what stats you're looking at. Basic hygiene from sewage not being in streets and people washing their hands (including surgeons) was huge in decreasing fatal infections from things like broken bones. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2895849/ A lot of that gets attributed to antibiotics, but those came along later (on accident and with plenty of side effects, of course). And like you said, it's hard to trust history as it's been told/sold to us, so tracking these things is challenging.
I'm reminded of a line from the Jimmy Eat World song, Futures:
Brilliant connections that you drew here. The connections you made make sense to me. And the "improvements" to birthing processes in the early 1900s - courtesy of a combination of the Flexner Report and Dr. Joseph DeLee - certainly did not improve birth outcomes, but worsened infant mortality over the course of the next several decades.
Is it a bunch of creative math to get to longer reported lifespans? Or is it more than that?
Depends what stats you're looking at. Basic hygiene from sewage not being in streets and people washing their hands (including surgeons) was huge in decreasing fatal infections from things like broken bones. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2895849/ A lot of that gets attributed to antibiotics, but those came along later (on accident and with plenty of side effects, of course). And like you said, it's hard to trust history as it's been told/sold to us, so tracking these things is challenging.
I'm reminded of a line from the Jimmy Eat World song, Futures:
"Hey now, the past is told by those who win.
My darling, what matters is what hasn't been."