Comment by otabdeveloper4
1 day ago
> Plague doctors had pleasant-smelling herbs in their masks because that seemed like a reasonable defense against the disease.
The implied condescension hits hard after the Covid masking debacle.
1 day ago
> Plague doctors had pleasant-smelling herbs in their masks because that seemed like a reasonable defense against the disease.
The implied condescension hits hard after the Covid masking debacle.
What debacle? That masks only reduced transmission by about 30% and not 100% and a large statistically illiterate portion of society didn't understand that 30% reduction is better than 0% reduction?
The debacle of failing to convey the concrete reality of aerosol transmission and failing to convey the concrete reality of masks that gape at the sides (“surgical masks”) fundamentally and obviously not protecting against aerosol transmission while masks that don’t gape at the sides (N95/FFP2) fundamentally and obviously and provably do protect against aerosol transmission.
The thing with the masks is exactly the same as if public shopping efficiency authorities had consistently put out the large-scale message that “bags” work to carry groceries but conflating mesh bags with non-perforated bags; Yes, mesh bags do tend to get upwards of 30% of the objects you purchase to your home. There’s an underlying insult to common sense and people are actually not stupid.
British lawyer and commentator David Allen Green has things to say about certain patterns of speech, phrases such as "absolutely clear" are used only when one has not been at all clear: https://davidallengreen.com/2021/11/let-me-be-absolutely-cle...
Likewise, I would add "obviously": I have never seen "obvious" used to describe anything which is obvious, only things which are not.
The phrase "common sense" is even worse, as about half the time it points to claims that are in fact false.
So, in this case, surgical masks: you say it's "obvious" they're not good enough and compare them to a mesh bag. Perhaps they are that bad, but it's not obvious, and "common sense"* suggests to me that surgeons, who are necessarily working with unwell and often immunocompromised people, will desire something that doesn't let one of the surgical team put a random bacterial mix into someone's new kidney when they sneeze.
* I am aware of the irony; and yes, despite this I can also name a famous example where surgeons collectively were very wrong
1 reply →
I guess they linked germs to bad smells (e.g. miasma) and figured out good smells might counter them. It's a pity they hadn't invented essential oils at the time.
Ibn Al-Baytar begs to differ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Baytar
Exactly (about miasmas)!
I thought about making a comment on essential oils in my original comment, but chickened out.
At least that makes some logical sense.
Covidian sympathetic magic (wear a strip of cloth over your mouth but not your nose to appease the germ gods) doesn't.
Who was advocating for leaving your nose out? We used to make fun of the morons we saw doing that.
Frankly, I’m sad masks aren’t still more of a thing. I don’t want to wear one all the time, but if you’re sick and need to be in a public place, throw one on out of consideration for your peers.
I honestly didn't mean any condescension.
Years ago, I read a roleplaying book ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkworld ) that had a throwaway comment that many ancient civilizations had decent medical care for injuries, but good care for disease was much less common. Ancient Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, Mayans, and others mastered various forms of surgery. They even recognized that some materials (such as silver staples) were better for closing wounds because they would be less likely to get infected.
But disease was always much harder to understand. It's usually hard to tell if somebody got better because of treatment, or because they were just going to get better ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_touch ), and (sadly) if everybody got the same treatment, it wasn't always obvious when the treatment killed people ( https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e... : George Washington died because he received drastic treatment for a sore throat; including having a doctor remove about half of the blood in his body. People at the time didn't realize that the treatment was the problem, they just believed that sore throats were incredibly dangerous ("George Washington then called for Tobias Lear. Lear recorded that Washington told him, '... I believed from the first that the disorder would prove fatal'")).
I honestly once thought it would be cool to have a TV series based on the Knights Hospitallers, but realized they’d just be bleeding people in every episode (different time period, same idea: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/chirugeon ). Our understanding of germs is very recent. The 1896 book “The Chemistry of Cookery” ( https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53458 ) says “I should add that this germ theory of disease is disputed by some who maintain that the source of the diseases attributed to such microbia is chemical poison, the microbia (i.e. little living things) are merely accidental, or creatures fed on the disease-producing poison.” That is, even at the end of the 1800s, whether bacteria caused illness was still disputed.
During the black death, the people did the best they could with the knowledge they had. But we can do better with the knowledge we have, and that's easy to prove based on comparing modern recovery rates to what they were in Europe in the 1300s. It would be depressing if medical science hadn’t improved in the last 700 years.
Oops. “The Chemistry of Cookery” is from 1892.