Chapter 196: Heading Home

It was a moving day for a very important family for our survival, having a qualified doctor in town would seriously increase our chances of success. Getting him to work with the Pawnee and African healers would go even further. Home remedies such as willow bark are basically the same thing as what you find lining the shelves of the modern drug store. Yet Bayer, with their Aspirin product, built a pharmaceutical empire that in the future modern day was busy poisoning all of the crop fields. Meanwhile extract of willow bark provided the same relief for free to knowledgeable people around the world. Willow bark has been in use since long before baby Jesus pissed off the cow by shitting in her food that Christmas morn; the Sumerians documented it’s uses quite extensively. The list of effective remedies growing in the wild is stunning yet people in the modern world continue to ignore them and purchase a derived and shrunk wrapped version of the same thing. Quite amazing over all.

Another important discovery was inoculation against disease, smallpox was the culprit easiest to address. Inoculation simply required you to sniff a tiny bit of powder up your nose, you then got slightly ill for a day or two and after that remained immune for the rest of your life. The powder was easy to make, it was simply smallpox scabs ground up finely with a mortar and pestle. So easy and effective was this that Gen. George Washington required that all volunteers be inoculated before they were allowed to serve. The fact that this joyful disease had a mortality rate of between twenty and thirty-five percent made it an easy decision, not to mention just how horrific and painful the disease itself was. But still, sniffing dried pox scabs is a pretty nasty concept.

Cholera should be manageable for us with good sanitation and care of our drinking water, the odds of us copying the vaccine itself were pretty damn low. However I was quite sure that ‘Death by Diarrhea’ which is what cholera offered was not high on anyone’s list of preferred exit scenarios and our sanitation work would be well received by all.

The diseases were in my mind as I rode into town after breakfast, mostly because one of our new Marine House residents was badly scarred by the pox. The early morning sight of his ruined visage rattled home the significance of not having vaccinations around in this era, all of the twitchers were well vaccinated but nobody from this era was. We would definitely suffer through several nasty epidemics over the coming decades and the best we could hope was to alleviate symptoms and prevent the preventable.

Rather moribund thoughts to start a busy day and definitely not the mood I wanted to be in while welcoming our new doctor recruit and his family. Like anyone else shifting my mood from a mentally stubborn subject like disease and other misfortune wasn’t easy to do. It took concentrated effort and a lot of focus to keep myself from sliding back into the ‘What could go wrong’ mentality. The human mind seemed to be hard-wired to expect the worst and if you let it run wild it could really get you down.