Life in the 21st Century

In the early 1870s, Joseph Lister became the granddaddy of modern medical antiseptic practices, demonstrating in experiment after experiment that treating open wounds with antiseptic solutions not only encouraged healing but even prevented loss of limbs for injuries that otherwise would have always necessitated amputation in those days before antibiotics.

As early as 1640, the basic principle of using mold to treat wounds was a common treatment. In the 1870s the mold penicillium was specifically discovered by Lister to work to cure wounds that antiseptics were ineffective at treating. A series of 19th century scientists across Europe continued to make discoveries about the efficacy of what would widely become known as penicillin, though it was not until the early 1940s that efficient methods were developed for producing it in bulk for medical purposes.

And now in the 21st century, after days of fever, body aches, sore throat, and glands the size of golf balls in my neck, a few-minutes-long "rapid strep test" diagnoses me with strep throat. Ten minutes after I hand a slip of paper to the pharmacist who works across the hall from my doctor's office, I am taking my first dose of penicillin at the water fountain. Now, 48 hours later, I feel nearly symptom free.

This was going to be a post about how incredibly grateful I am to live in a time with effective antibiotics, how I never forget that my life with modern medicine is so very much better and easier than life 75 or 150 years ago.

But now I sit in my living room, watching Anderson Cooper -- who just a few days ago was attired in an impeccably well-fitting navy blue suit commenting on the Democratic National Convention. He is standing in a red windbreaker in the French Quarter saying "we kind of thought it would be worse" as the winds of Gustav buffet him around. And my strep throat seems like small potatoes. This morning, I am grateful for living in the 21st century not just for its antibiotics, but for its storm tracking, weather projection models, news coverage, and evacuation buses. I am grateful to live in a time when it's possible to know a hurricane is arriving DAYS before it actually makes landfall. When people, with memories of the ways that even our 21st century technology can fail us, can at the very least get their families out.

While I will never understand why people would choose to "hunker down" and "wait it out" rather than leave with the things most precious to them in the world, I am grateful that our technology enables to make that choice a conscious one. It was not that long ago that people were simply slammed by hurricanes with very little warning, left to batten things down as the rain first started and suggested what was to come.

Today, I am watching the news, thinking of friends who have evacuated, of the many more people I don't know who are in the line of danger -- or whose homes are. And while I am eternally grateful for broadcast technology, levee engineering, and all the other technological advances that combine to provide warnings and some modicum of protection, the fact remains that Mother Nature is a fierce fierce force whose power cannot always be resisted. And so, I watch, and wait, and hope on behalf of those whose lives are in the path of this storm. Hope that in this round the 21st century may ultimately triumph over Mother Nature's power.