3 ms·

Modern medicine is barely a generation old.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Right: if you go back two generous human lifespans there is almost nothing. I always have two specific lifespans in mind when I say this: my late father’s and that of a man he admired and studied under in his youth: Alexander Fleming. Go back before Fleming’s birth in 1881 and you are in the medical dark ages in some respects. The NHS is really only a human lifespan old.
- currymj 3y ago
  there was a popular medical textbook, reprinted well into 1920s, that still recommended bloodletting. (and not in some sensible "did you know actually leeches are still useful for healing wounds?" way. just old school bloodletting.)
- jcims 3y ago
  I get what you're saying and it doesn't make a material difference, but a lifespan and a generation are quite different. My grandpa was born in 1928, when penicillin was discovered. There's a picture of him holding my brother's grandson. That's five generations in one lifespan, four of which could have been meaningfully impacted by the availability of a general antibiotic. Now are we going to start observing the influence of that on the human immune system in four generations? No. Forty? Maybe a little bump in the noise floor. Four hundred? Almost certainly yes.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    Yes, you're correct of course -- I'm just concurring that medicine is really really new.
jcims 3y ago
True but if you could somehow chart 'robustness of homo sapiens' over time, it seems plausible that modern medicine and technology has and will continue to influence it. Little things like food allergies that may have a genetic component seem to be able to persist now that we have effective mitigations for them. As a counterpoint, transportation is a major feature of modern technology that has resulted in a lot more mixing of heritable traits that could previously have been regionally isolated. That's probably a net good thing for robustness. Kind of pointless mental exercise but something I ponder on occasionally.

Right: if you go back two generous human lifespans there is almost nothing. I always have two specific lifespans in mind when I say this: my late father’s and that of a man he admired and studied under in his youth: Alexander Fleming. Go back before Fleming’s birth in 1881 and you are in the medical dark ages in some respects. The NHS is really only a human lifespan old.

currymj 3y ago
there was a popular medical textbook, reprinted well into 1920s, that still recommended bloodletting. (and not in some sensible "did you know actually leeches are still useful for healing wounds?" way. just old school bloodletting.)
jcims 3y ago
I get what you're saying and it doesn't make a material difference, but a lifespan and a generation are quite different. My grandpa was born in 1928, when penicillin was discovered. There's a picture of him holding my brother's grandson. That's five generations in one lifespan, four of which could have been meaningfully impacted by the availability of a general antibiotic. Now are we going to start observing the influence of that on the human immune system in four generations? No. Forty? Maybe a little bump in the noise floor. Four hundred? Almost certainly yes.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Yes, you're correct of course -- I'm just concurring that medicine is really really new.

jcims 3y ago

True but if you could somehow chart 'robustness of homo sapiens' over time, it seems plausible that modern medicine and technology has and will continue to influence it. Little things like food allergies that may have a genetic component seem to be able to persist now that we have effective mitigations for them. As a counterpoint, transportation is a major feature of modern technology that has resulted in a lot more mixing of heritable traits that could previously have been regionally isolated. That's probably a net good thing for robustness. Kind of pointless mental exercise but something I ponder on occasionally.