I don’t even know where to start. This book was fun to read and I felt like I learned a lot. It covered both the specific facts of Robert Koch’s quest to prove germ theory and cure tuberculosis, and provided a good general sense of how science and medicine move forward and don’t.
A couple of specifically interesting points: doctors fought germ theory tooth and nail. They also rejected stethoscopes as technological interlopers to be disposed of because they threatened the doctors importance, while using so many leaches prosperous countries had to import them. The naive interpretation is “doctors are idiots, their reluctant to use quantified self data is proof they haven’t changed.” This is the first time I’ve seen any hint as to why they found germ theory so implausible. In the particular case of tuberculosis, everyone was exposed all the time, and it took the infection years to become symptomatic. Preventing any one exposure wouldn’t have had noticeable results. Another early-identified bacteria was Anthrax, which didn’t follow a typical exposure pattern either. The doctors still come out looking pretty bad for refusing to wash their hands between autopsies and childbirth, but marginally less than they might have.
I knew this already, but it was good to have a reminder that the first person to suggest the germ theory of disease, Ignez Summelweis, died in an insane asylum. This either means that people with truly visionary ideas can be broken when we reject them, or germ theory was so crazy it took a crazy person to see it. Goetz doesn’t mention it but according to my dad Summelweis was also an asshole, which I try to remind myself every time someone mean says something I disagree with.
Remember last week when I suggested using microchips to force people to finish their antibiotics? Several friends seriously questioned the effect of that, since they didn’t estimate the contribution of unfinished antibiotics to antibiotic resistance as very high. The Remedy says that the current protocol for drug resistant TB is to have a medic visit a patient every day for 6 -24 months to observe them taking their pills, because drug resistant TB is that big a problem and the pills are that unpleasant. So at least in that situation swallowable microchips would be an enormous improvement.
Apparently syphilis is always the [nationality] disease, where the nationality is not the speaker’s. French is the most popular, but far from the only
I’ve always found the methods section the most boring of any paper or textbook. I want to know what we learned, not how. But The Remedy (and to a lesser extent Neanderthal Man, which I reviewed last week) made it seem interesting. I’m still not terribly interested in microscopy, but it was deeply interesting to see how advances in technology enabled scientific advances. Using or inventing new technology is how you move the world forward. And when I thought about it, the modern field that most reminds me of the wide-open-ness of microbiology in the mid 1800s is programming. That is where I get the most sense of possibility. I still really care about translational health (in fact this book taught me that that is the word for what I am trying to do with this blog) and mental health, but I am feeling more and more like staying in programming would be the best way to accomplish that.
Aceso Under Glass 