3 ms·

What I find amazing is how recently things like germs[1] were given real attention. I'd heard about Ignaz Semmelweis from a book I read and to think less than

by hfsktr 13y ago

What I find amazing is how recently things like germs[1] were given real attention. I'd heard about Ignaz Semmelweis from a book I read and to think less than 200 years ago you would go to a hospital and they didn't bother to wash their hands between patients? Now maybe it was just the hospital in Vienna, but I imagine many were like that. Just the things that are taken for granted as common sense now before they were. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease

btilly 13y ago
It is worse than that. Ignaz Semmelweis did not come to broader attention. It was not until Joseph Lister (the Lister in "Listerine") independently discovered this and popularized it that the English speaking world became aware of how they were killing people. I have encountered mention of memoirs from US surgeons who were most distressed to have learned, shortly after the Civil War, how their failure to take simple sanitation measures was responsible for the death of many of their patients through gangrene. Within living memory we had a similar shock from antibiotics. I remember an older professor telling me about a doctor he knew who had been unable to save his brother, but would have been able to do so a few years later. I am sure there are still things out there like this. Heck, I lost my nephew because my sister followed her doctor's instructions to have him sleep on his stomach...less than 6 months before the American Academy of Pediatrics switched the recommendation to putting babies on their backs to reduce the odds of SIDS. If you've taken a parenting course in the last 20 years, sleeping babies on their back probably just seems like common sense to you.
dredmorbius 13y ago
The amount of progress in knowledge and technology in the past 200-250 years or so (pretty much all of the Industrial Revolution) really is staggering. Take someone from 1750, drop him in the world of 1500, and things would have been pretty familiar. Move 250 years in the other direction and he'd be hard-pressed to make heads or tails of anything (assuming you're taking someone from a part of the developed world -- for the developing world, the changes would be less pronounced, but still likely significant).
- hfsktr 13y ago
  I had a strange notion recently that if you were to drop the average person (not an Einstein or a Hawking) and dropped them into say the 1500s Europe. Most people think we'd be regarded as super smart and awesome. This comedian explains most people don't know crap[1], we only know the high-level. I think that even if we could find things we understand to teach it would be largely not viable (how much stuff around us requires machines and precision?) and likely wouldn't reach any audience to become a mainstream idea (even above people thought it ridiculous that germs exist). I think we'd find people of any time to have clever methods to do their tasks and we'd learn from them and become indistinguishable from the average guy at the time. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVxOb8-d7Ic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVxOb8-d7Ic
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    I'm not saying that humans are smarter in a generally useful sense now than they were 500 years ago. Especially at the median, where what most people know isn't how things work but what they need to do to make things work within their environment. Take your average man or woman off the street today and drop them into 1500s Europe, in all likelihood they'd be unable to function. Now, an engineer (or a Connecticut Yankee) with both a specific understanding of materials science, a knowledge of history sufficient to know the broad outlines of circumstances in the past, and where the gold (or more importantly: coal and oil) are buried, might be able to accomplish some interesting things. If he could convince someone to go along with his proposals. But that's not my point. It's that you could pretty much take a European from 1500 and from 1750 and have them swap places. Most of the general nature of day-to-day life would remain largely similar. There were very few significant changes (among the biggest would have been in how business and banking were organized, as financial systems were developing over this period). Socially and culturally there may have been a few bigger differences. Martin Luther posted his 95 Thesis in 1517, and the changes that this triggered in the Church would likely have dwarfed much else. And really, you could move another 500 or 1000 years backward and you'd see some incremental change, but nothing at all like the past 250 years. But again, 1750 -> 1500 is going to be a hugely different change than 1750 -> 2000.
  - 13y ago

by hfsktr 13y ago

btilly 13y ago

It is worse than that. Ignaz Semmelweis did not come to broader attention. It was not until Joseph Lister (the Lister in "Listerine") independently discovered this and popularized it that the English speaking world became aware of how they were killing people. I have encountered mention of memoirs from US surgeons who were most distressed to have learned, shortly after the Civil War, how their failure to take simple sanitation measures was responsible for the death of many of their patients through gangrene. Within living memory we had a similar shock from antibiotics. I remember an older professor telling me about a doctor he knew who had been unable to save his brother, but would have been able to do so a few years later. I am sure there are still things out there like this. Heck, I lost my nephew because my sister followed her doctor's instructions to have him sleep on his stomach...less than 6 months before the American Academy of Pediatrics switched the recommendation to putting babies on their backs to reduce the odds of SIDS. If you've taken a parenting course in the last 20 years, sleeping babies on their back probably just seems like common sense to you.

dredmorbius 13y ago

The amount of progress in knowledge and technology in the past 200-250 years or so (pretty much all of the Industrial Revolution) really is staggering. Take someone from 1750, drop him in the world of 1500, and things would have been pretty familiar. Move 250 years in the other direction and he'd be hard-pressed to make heads or tails of anything (assuming you're taking someone from a part of the developed world -- for the developing world, the changes would be less pronounced, but still likely significant).

hfsktr 13y ago
I had a strange notion recently that if you were to drop the average person (not an Einstein or a Hawking) and dropped them into say the 1500s Europe. Most people think we'd be regarded as super smart and awesome. This comedian explains most people don't know crap[1], we only know the high-level. I think that even if we could find things we understand to teach it would be largely not viable (how much stuff around us requires machines and precision?) and likely wouldn't reach any audience to become a mainstream idea (even above people thought it ridiculous that germs exist). I think we'd find people of any time to have clever methods to do their tasks and we'd learn from them and become indistinguishable from the average guy at the time. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVxOb8-d7Ic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVxOb8-d7Ic
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  I'm not saying that humans are smarter in a generally useful sense now than they were 500 years ago. Especially at the median, where what most people know isn't how things work but what they need to do to make things work within their environment. Take your average man or woman off the street today and drop them into 1500s Europe, in all likelihood they'd be unable to function. Now, an engineer (or a Connecticut Yankee) with both a specific understanding of materials science, a knowledge of history sufficient to know the broad outlines of circumstances in the past, and where the gold (or more importantly: coal and oil) are buried, might be able to accomplish some interesting things. If he could convince someone to go along with his proposals. But that's not my point. It's that you could pretty much take a European from 1500 and from 1750 and have them swap places. Most of the general nature of day-to-day life would remain largely similar. There were very few significant changes (among the biggest would have been in how business and banking were organized, as financial systems were developing over this period). Socially and culturally there may have been a few bigger differences. Martin Luther posted his 95 Thesis in 1517, and the changes that this triggered in the Church would likely have dwarfed much else. And really, you could move another 500 or 1000 years backward and you'd see some incremental change, but nothing at all like the past 250 years. But again, 1750 -> 1500 is going to be a hugely different change than 1750 -> 2000.
- 13y ago