re: #57 wheat-dogg, raker of forests, master of steam

Medical “science” back then was not that far away from witchcraft or herbal treatments. Germ theory, as it was called then, took a long time to be accepted, because (like that Fox News talking head recently said) you can’t see the germs, so how can they make you sick? Miasma (bad air) was the go-to reason for most urban diseases. Doctors just knew it was true, because that’s what their teachers and books told them. Likewise, they were slow in adopting the habit of *washing their hands* before delivering babies or conducting surgeries, thereby carelessly infecting their patients with dog-knows-what the doc had last put his hands into. Many mothers died of infection soon after giving birth, because their attending physician (or nurse or midwife) had failed to wash up first.

I’m quite sure one of my great-grandmothers died in this way, at age 24, just a few months after giving birth.

IIRC, there was an incident in the Thames River, where there was an accident between two ferries; a bunch of people went into the drink as a result.

Problem was, this particular stretch of the Thames was the sewage discharge for London…..and those poor devils basically drowned in liquefied shit.

Yeesh.

Things like this make me shake my head at modern groups like these anti-vaxx morons. They’ve consciously chosen to reject empiricism for what they believe to be true. It’s “feels over reals” come to life - we’ve entered the Age of Unreason.