Praising Modern Medicine

WE ARE EXTREMELY FORTUNATE, notwithstanding the thousands of recent deaths from Ebola, and the continuing threat. If this virus had emerged only two or three generations ago, it may well have eventuated in a global catastrophe of tens of millions of deaths. During the seventeen seventies, in Philadelphia, each year the entire population of thirty thousand, or most of it, would flee to the countryside as a small pox epidemic ripped through the city. The annual event played havoc with the first and second continental congresses, and the Declaration of Independence was nearly scuttled. Prior to Louis Pasteur and the discovery of microorganisms in the late nineteenth century, homo sapiens was helpless against infection and viral contagion, and on several occasions was nearly wiped out on account thereof. Long live blood testing and vaccines!