As we begin to collectively emerge from what might well be the weirdest year anyone under the age of 110 might recall, as bumpy as it is, it can behoove us to reflect on some of the most important and impactful medical advances in human history. Things that allowed our frail species to live and fight another day. Because, if we’re not fucking, we’re fighting. That’s just how humans roll. It’s served us well enough to not be extinct yet, so let’s take a look back at how the greatest human minds have tackled some of the deadliest biological threats we’ve yet faced.
We’ve all watched enough over-dramatized historical documentaries to know that innovative ideas like blaming the Jews, stuffing herbs into nightmare- fueled masks, killing all the cats, and shrieking about miasmas were perplexingly ineffective against this nasty little bacterium. Fortunately, though, there was French-born physician and surgeon Guy De Chauliac, who advised Pope Clement VI to lock himself in his chambers and admit no one. This may well qualify as the first time social distancing was ever employed. Despite his revolutionary work and insistence on continuing to treat sick patients rather than fleeing in terror like his more sensible peers at the time, he did eventually kick the proverbial bucket in 1368, but not before contracting—and apparently overcoming—a bout of Bubonic plague himself. Count this one as a true badass of history. His reasonable, compassionate medical treatise on plague remains a high point from a time that most sensible people assumed the end of the world was fucking nigh.
Despite its diminutive name, this absolute downer of a disease had been a scourge of our species for pretty much ever. If you weren’t covered in horrible, disfiguring scars from beating it, you were almost certainly dead—at least, that is, until this English country doctor from Gloucester was making eyes at milkmaids and happened to notice they seemed to be largely unaffected by arguably the worst disease in human history. He’d noticed the milkmaids would get one gnarly pustule on their hand (I assume this was during a clandestine tryst— "WTF?! No girl, just bend over and do NOT touch me with that shit!"), but then they would never get smallpox. He got the bright idea to cut open one of their pustules and rub the diseased goo into a scratch he made on the arm of one of James Phipps— then, an 8-year-old son of one of his employees. Despite violating like every OSHA rule ever, it actually worked, and thus the very first vaccine (called variolation then, for whatever sciency reason) was born.
Strep, staph, gonorrhea, pneumonia, and a host of other less-than-awesome infections we now regard as little more than itchy irritations, were once a major, major problem for humanity. Lucky for us all, there was Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scottish researcher and intelligent slob, who accidentally left some of his research in less-than-sterile conditions. One fateful evening in 1928, after returning from a 2-week holiday (bender, I assume), he noticed the specimen plate he’d coated in staphylococci had grown mold on it. Amazingly, this mold had retarded the growth of the bacteria, and thus the first antibiotic, penicillin, was created. So next time you ignore your dishes for a couple of weeks, and someone gives you shit about it, just claim you’re a misunderstood bacteriologist like Fleming.
Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and some other nerds eventually realized that Fleming’s discovery was like, mad dope, yo. In 1941, they decided to trial run their antibacterial drug (penicillin) on one poor shlub named Albert Alexander, who was dying from an infected scratch on the face he’d sustained from "falling into a rose bush" (right, whatever man). At the time they administered the first dose, he was at death’s door. Within 24 hours, he was walking, talking, and ready to kick that rose bush into powder. Unfortunately, despite isolating the penicillin from his urine and re-injecting it, the team ran out of the life-saving drug, and Alexander lapsed back into a coma and died. The moral here is definitely do not fuck with the wrong rose bush. Also, maybe make enough of a medicine to cure someone instead of just "almost" curing them. That’d be cool.
Jesse William Lazear is arguably the first guy who thought dying of a hemorrhagic fever would be super. He’d been studying these afflictions at Johns Hopkins since 1895, and in 1900, decided moving to Cuba and seeing them firsthand was the only way he could make this happen. At the time, malaria and yellow fever had killed more soldiers than had died by human hands in the Spanish- American war. Lazear was bunking with these very military folks when he made the trek down there and there hatched his brilliant scheme. Most physicians thought these fevers were the result of "contaminated linens" (oookay?), but Lazear had other ideas and secretly exposed himself to an infected mosquito. He’d suspected they were vectors for the parasites that were the source of all this woe. Lucky for him, he totally scored and died of yellow fever in 1900 while still working on a vaccine.
The list goes on. Humans have never coped all that well with disease, even at our most sincere. The crux of this—the lesson to be had while reflecting on these medical breakthroughs— seems to be this: Disease is ugly, and humans are at least that bad. You thought I was going to add a happy caveat to that, and I totally didn’t; joke’s on you, microbiology will always win. All we can do is muddle through, try to make the best of it, and please, don’t run around in a cloud of malarial mosquitoes?
Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle has never even once intentionally exposed herself to an incurable disease... so far. She can be found on Facebook as Esmeralda Marina and Instagram as @EsmeraldaSilentCitadel. Please, keep your filthy human germs to yourself.
