The Story of Industrial Civilization: Medicine

Progress writer Jason Crawford is writing a book about the modern world and how it was invented. In a series of salons, we will explore this content together, chapter by chapter, and get an inside look at the author’s creative process.

Behind the world of our daily lives, there is a hidden world, one that keeps our world running. It is an industrial world, one of factories, engines, chemicals, and infrastructure, that most people rarely notice or appreciate. But every piece of it is a solution to a problem: a way to satisfy human needs in the face of nature’s constraints.

Session 9 – Medicine:

Even after humanity had created the steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph, we were still largely helpless against disease. As late as 1850, global average life expectancy at birth was under 30 years—mostly because of very high infant and child mortality. This salon will focus on the story of our conquest of infectious disease, and how we built up our three layers of defense: sanitation, immunization, and pharmaceuticals. What progress was possible even before the germ theory was established? How did that theory come about, and what progress did it unlock? Why did penicillin sit on the shelf for more than a decade after its original discovery, before it was made into an effective treatment? How was smallpox eradicated? We’ll cover all this and more.

Crawford will open the salon by talking about his research and writing on the topic so far, followed by discussion and Q&A.

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