The year is 1349, the place, England. Plague ravages the land, bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic - I have travelled back in time to help out the hapless peasants and brought a modern doctor with me. A General Practitioner, I think you call them ‘family doctors’ in America, not a specialist.
Unfortunately our time machine works on Terminator rules, so we can’t take back any meds. After stealing some clothes, where would we start? Would a modern doctor be of any use whatsoever with what was available in the mid 14th century, without an array of pharmaceuticals and diagnostic tools?
I would hazard a guess and say that even a GP might know the basic procedures for dealing with infectious disease, and therefore, given sufficient authority (and not being burned at the stake for witchcraft or demon molestation) could institute quarantines thereby slowing the spread.
In addition to quarantines,knowing the vectors of the disease would also help as would knowing how to support the stricken.
However, looking at the list of antibiotics to which Y. pestis is susceptible, I don’t think you have a hope of synthesising a cure.
Cleanliness, and aseptic technique would go a long way though.
A modern doctor would be no better able to make antibiotics using 14th century stuff than any other random modern person. So their ability to help plague victims would be limited.
Bubonic plague requires antibiotics, so the individual patients might be screwed.
Even without modern medicine, a doctor could still direct what is called “preventive medicine.” By educating the population about the cause of the disease, the importance of eradicating rodents, and maintaining hygiene, he could reduce the number of victims and save millions of lives.
Read Ken Follett’s World Without End, which describes an unlikely ahead-of-her-time female healer who successfully combats the plague by segregating those with the disease from others, having caretakers wear masks, having them wash their hands with vinegar after teating the ill, and quarantining the town. This, I think, is how a modern practitioner could make a cdifference – not with antbiotics, but with modern safeguards and techniques and standards of cleanliness. A modermn doctor, knowing about sterilization, effective treatments, and the progress of te disease (as well as its vectors – fleas on rats) would be even more effective than Follett’s charscter Caris.
So, some guy is going to come along to a vastly superstitious & non-critical-thinking society, speaking in a very weird accent, and tell the locals there are no witches or demons involved, and stop killing the cats because they kill rats that carry fleas that carry tiny little things in their spit that nobody can see and that’s what causes the disease; and that if you’ve got the disease, you’re probably screwed but drink lots of rose hip tea because of the vitamin C (another substance nobody can see) might help…aaaand remind me again why he isn’t going straight to the bonfire? At the very least if he’s very successful someone in power is going to feel threatened and hang him from a hook on the castle wall.
The guy is going to find himself on some local wise-guy’s larder scale to see if he weighs the same as a duck in no time at all.
Never said they were idiots, just unable to read and thus wouldn’t even have the base of knowledge to understand germs and how sanitation prevents disease.
I’m afraid Inigo is right. Maybe you could camouflage the isolation of victims and rat-killing activities, by insisting that these measures are necessary to prevent demons from spreading amongst the population.
And of course, without antibiotics the caring modern M.D. is going to croak of plague him/herself.
I’m a biologist, not a doctor (dammit Jim!) and if I were sent back in time in the OP’s scenario I’d make a stab at isolating penicillin, using basic knowledge of microbiology and chemistry. There’s probably more than a few doctors out there that could say the same. (But perhaps they’d be preoccupied by treating all the actual sick people…)
The stuff is inside common mold. As a first attempt, I’d isolate a bunch of different mold types, and see if any inhibit growth of bacteria I cultured from my body. Then once I have a good strain, I’d work out a way to grow large batches of it, and then extract the penicillin – basically trying any available solvents, and any tricks I can recall to precipitate out particular substances.
With the benefit of Google, I can see that the growth and extraction of penicillin is actually very simple. Just grow a big kettle of the right sort of mold, let it ferment for a week. The penicillin is just precipitated out of liquid growing media with the addition of potassium.
It’d require a lot of trial and error to figure this out with medieval technology, but I don’t think it’s impossible. The hardest part would be trying to get things sterile enough to do any sort of microbiology. There’s no autoclave… but thorough boiling might be good enough. And I’d guess that it would require the patronage of a wealthy noble, just to get all the resources. (E.g. some glass blowers would make everything a lot easier…)
Growing penicillin in kettles doesn’t scale very well to all of Europe, however. Good hygiene and quarantine techniques would probably do more to stop the epidemic.
Also…Europe is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. So with limited literacy you can’t just write your instructions down and hope they’ll be understood and obeyed; and even if you did, that’s a lot of writing with no printing presses to help you; and even if you got enough pamphlets printed up, how are you going to disperse them to enough cities & villages to make enough of a dent in the epidemic so as to create actual disease-free zones?
And if you made pencillin, who’s to say they’d use it right? My money says they’d abuse the stuff and in no time at all you’d have penicillin-resistant Super Plague. Then the Moors would come in and clean up and make everything Muslim, North & South America would never get discovered and the USA, would never come into being. OP: Why do you hate the USA?! (ok, and those other countries in the Americas)
The guys who did it first struggled quite a bit to scale up the production of penicillin and they had labs at Cambridge (?) university in which to experiment.
Also, I’m not sure how effective penicillin is against Y. pestis.
Worth trying though, if you happen to be there at the time.
I never said that it would be easy. Given the limited number of options, teaching people to avoid the disease vector does the most good for the largest number people.
I guess knowing how the disease was transmitted might do some good, but in the absence of any practical way to exterminate rats or fleas, the utility of the knowledge would probably be limited.
Yeah, I’m not saying that I’d be successful… but I can imagine some bullshit Mary Sue story where it all works out. Even then, it’d take years or decades. And in the end, my “grow mold in a kettle of beef broth and hope for the best” strategy might just barely yield enough antibiotic to treat a handful of people.
It has been suggested by perfectly credible people that the black death (as opposed to the plauge) was not yersinia pestis at all, nor anything even vaguely similar.
Or equally you might be able to create a vast following, and eventually army, just with the amazing stuff you can demonstrate and predict*.
I think we should just assume cooperation because I think the OP is largely asking about the usefulness of 21st century science without 21st century pharma, equipment, support etc.
No, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head either. But you’d have plenty of time to think of some neat tricks, what with no TV and Internet to distract you.
