by Jason Crawford · January 5, 2022 · 1 min read
Tickets are now available for session 9 of my salon series with Interintellect, “The Story of Industrial Civilization”. Sunday, January 16, 10am Pacific.
Topic: Medicine
Even after humanity had created the steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph, we were still largely helpless against disease. As late as 1850, global average life expectancy at birth was under 30 years—mostly because of very high infant and child mortality. This salon will focus on the story of our conquest of infectious disease, and how we built up our three layers of defense: sanitation, immunization, and pharmaceuticals. What progress was possible even before the germ theory was established? How did that theory come about, and what progress did it unlock? Why did penicillin sit on the shelf for more than a decade after its original discovery, before it was made into an effective treatment? How was smallpox eradicated? We’ll cover all this and more.
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