I’m working on a treatment for a novel at the moment and I need a little help with one aspect of it. The scenario is that a terrible apocalyptic event has occurred wiping out all but a tiny handful of people (about 150 people). The event destroyed absolutely everything, so there are no books, no computers, and no technological equipment of any kind. The event has altered the atmosphere somewhat and vegetation has flourished since it happened. All the plants that exist today still exist. None of the survivors has any medical training whatsoever, apart from one or two people who have passed very rudimentary first-aid courses. To what extent could they rebuild medical science in this scenario?
P.S. - Just so you know, the event may possibly look a little bit like this
Sanatation is the most obvious thing you could impliment without much tech that would go a long way to keeping down mortality. Build latrines away from water sources, you could make crude soap from animal fats and potash (from burnt remains of vegetation). Don’t eat rotten food.
And a basic knowledge of nutrition might be useful in keeping away scurvey or rabbit starvation.
I don’t think you could get much further then that with just 150 people with no special knowledge. Most people have some idea that penicillian is extracted from molds somehow, so if they started culturing molds I guess they might hit upon the right species. I think you can extract the active chemical by simply turning it into a slurry and filtering out the solids.
The real benefit in this scenario is that they have information in their heads. They don’t have to rediscover the germ theory of disease. They know to keep wounds clean, and that little beasties live in water that hasn’t been sterilized. Any schlub who has watched TV know the following:
Boil water
Change bandages
Wash hands before you do anything to do with the patient (so again, no need to rediscover Semmelweis)
Sterilize instruments before any surgical procedure
In theory they understand that antibiotics could exist, so reinventing them would be something they could do soon-ish, even in some primitive poultice form. Maybe. They also understand a lot of basic information like the circulation of the blood, which is going to be useful in redeveloping medicine. Maybe this time they could put it on a sound scientific basis from the get-go.
How rudimentary are we talking. I have met lots of people with first aid certs who literally don’t know a rectum from a hole in the ground and have little comprehension beyond a handful of “IF this, THEN do this” concepts but none of the reasons why.
One of the things medicine has benefited greatly from is centuries of finding out what does not work. Without that, there is alot of wild ass guessing.
Pile waste away from food and living area. (Waste can be plant matter, stems, food remains, bones, meat, human feces and urine, even corpses of small animals.) Cover it up with plant matter.
Leave for 2 years. It will decompose.
Put remains on soil.
(Reference: The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. This book discusses how compisting happens, the lifecycles of various pathogens that pass through human waste and the human body, and what combination of time and temperature in the compost pile will kill the pathogens. Quite an eye-opener. I didn’t realize that meat was compostable before.)
150 people won’t build much of anything knowledge-based. They’ll be fully employed gathering enough to eat each day. The first time the group tries farming most will starve.
We have done these kinds of scenarios to death around here. The concensus is that most folks who’ve never thoguth about this stuff before wildly overestimate teh progress a small band could make, and grossly underestimate how many people is the minimum headcount to rise above subsistence gathering.
There is a lot of low-tech knowledge out there which most rural folks today would call “common sense.” And which most city folks, myself included, are only dimly aware of. So if placed in an environment with lots of those rural folks and plenty of easy to gather food, we might re-create the early 1700s within a century or so.
Doing an Industrial Revolution II will take a lot more people and about as long as it took last time since the folks doing it will be the descendants of the folks who had modern tech. Everything they know they will have learned via oral tradition second or third hand.
Just the knowledge that germs cause disease, and that boiling or alcohol kill germs, will put them ahead of the best medical technology of even a few centuries ago (an eyeblink, compared to the total history of humanity). If we assume that they’re surviving at all, then they’ll have the capability to boil water and to make alcohol.
First of all, they should share their first aid knowledge with the group.
But, if they only know rudimentary first aid, then their medical knowledge is unlikely to be the superset of the group’s medical knowledge…
So, at some point, when their immediate survival isn’t in a critical situation, they could take some time to make a reference of illnesses. Perhaps by asking every member what illnesses they or their families have ever had, and what the symptoms were etc.
Also they could try to compile a list of things that can be used as antiseptics and anaesthetics.
I’m a city boy, and even I know the theory of soap making. I think that the population will be aware of the need for hygiene – at least as much as they can manage – and soap has been made for thousands of years.
Broomstick mentioned distilling alcohol. I think most people know the theory; and I’m sure our survivors will want it, so they’re motivated.
Everyone knows that the bark of the white willow is ‘nature’s aspirin’. Pine needles can be steeped to make a tea that is useful for alleviating congestion. They’re also a source of vitamin C, which we need. Dried nettles are an anti-histamine.
And as I said, I’m a city boy; and these are just things that I’ve learned through osmosis (as opposed to studying herbology). Of course if you don’t have willows or pine trees or nettles, you can’t use them. But ISTM that there will be in a given group of people some who ‘picked up’ useful knowledge about their area.
The OP stipulates that vegetation is flourishing, and all modern plant species are still around, so I don’t imagine that’d be a problem.
EDIT: It also occurs to me that, since the OP wants this for a work of fiction, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to arrange that one of his characters really has had some training in herbalism.
The biggest things to understand about medicine are basic IMO. Germ theory and proper nutrition are the most important things to address if you want people to be healthy.
After that, very basic and free interventions can help with prevention and management of chronic illnesses. stress reduction, physical exercise, more socialization, etc. all can cut the rate of chronic illnesses of old age as well as the rates of mental illnesses among the young.
As far as major surgery for trauma, they are probably SOL.
So just with those interventions you could probably get 70% (as a guess) of the health benefits we take for granted today. Good nutrition, protection from microbes and lifestyle interventions to ward off chronic illnesses. You could probably get life expectancy to 75 with those interventions.
I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to have some plant fanciers (not pervy, mind you) in the survivors. Everyone I know is into gardening; out of 150 people, you’re likely to get one or two that know there’s a plant called soapwort, and you can make soap out of it.
ETA: And that you can get all the vitamin C you need from juniper berries.
