I had the displeasure to be sick last week. Nothing serious, something in the variety of bad colds with throat and ear extensions.
In fact, being moderately indisposed is not that bad: sitting in a heated room, with a pot of tea next to me. My computer giving me endless opportunities to various degrees of brainless entertainment. And above all, the luxury to know that it was going to be all right: if this pill didn’t kill the bug, some other spray-antibiotics combo would. Aches chemically reduced to background whispers.
So I pictured what it would have been a few hundred years ago. Panic. No central heating. Books if in a rich household, otherwise endless boredom and no distraction from pain. No medical science to speak of: you don’t know what’s happening to you (fiery humours?). If you’re lucky the local herbwoman has figured out that birch bark tea is aspirin.
You don’t know if you’re going to survive – it’s a lottery. And you might be permanently damaged, like, say, go deaf. And sometimes there’s no escape, like with the ever fashionable TB.
In fact, forget the time machine: that’s probably what it’s like when you’re ill in an underdeveloped country. Suddenly, organizations like Doctors without Borders start to make very much sense.
Darn. Never looked at it like that.
