thinkin’ some thoughts today

[marcicat]

This showed up on my pinboard network this week, and — since it seems I’m destined to bring up scurvy in at least 90% of my writing — I was of course interested.

Scott and Scurvy, by Maciej Cegłowski over at Idle Words

It’s a longish exploration of the history of scurvy, which — as this article mentions — I remember showing up in school as a brief “we figured out how to fix it and it was never a problem again” type of footnote. Not quite that simple, it turns out. It was an interesting read overall, but I particularly enjoyed the conclusions (what can I say, I like summaries), including this one:

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world – depression, autism, hypertension, obesity – will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Comments

[starandrea]

Wow. That's pretty sobering.

[marcicat]

And inspiring? IDK, I found it ultimately a hopeful takeaway -- like, even when we *think* we know what's what, and there's just this thing that's crazy hard to deal with, sometimes there's a solution we don't even have the concept for yet, but we will, and when we do we can have parties and make transcontinental voyages and stuff.

[starandrea]

Oh, yeah, totally agree! Hopeful takeaway, nice job picking out the coolest part of the article! :) I meant the whole thing about all of the accidentally invalidating their own cure and everyone dying and the dogs eating each other. I looked at Mimi and I was like, "wow, history, huh?" And then I was like, "you know they'll say that about us someday too. What a horrible time..."

[marcicat]

Yeah, I kind of ::cough:: skimmed a lot of the actual part about the arctic explorers. I don't really have the explorer gene, or the 'love reading about people's horrible historical experiences' gene. They totally will say that about this time too, I'm sure, but think of all the weird things we romanticize about history (like the Wild West?! VIctorian times?! all awful!) I wonder what future!people will pick about this time to think is cool and write historical romance fiction about.

[starandrea]

"YOU'VE GOT MAIL" ♥

[marcicat]

LOL YES!