If civilization as we know it is destroyed (peak oil, climate change, meteor, whatever) and we are returned to a lifestyle we had in 1500AD, what would be the most important healthcare advances we would need to rebuild in order to have a fairly healthy population that is capable of repopulating the planet and that offers a fairly decent healthspan ? Also this is assuming we do not have the resources we have now.
Things like clean drinking water, sanitation, vaccinations, good nutrition, hygiene, anti-septics are all important. I’d assume a few drugs would be very helpful too Things like anaesthetics for surgery, antibiotics, possibly a few CVD drugs to increase healthspan (aspirin, beta blockers, diuretics, ACE inhibitors, etc). You’d also need the hardware for basic surgery and first aid (dressings, surgical instruments, etc) as well as prophylactics to control STDs.
My impression is that once a nation obtains these things (techniques to control infectious diseases and the ability to obtain proper nutrition) life expectancy jumps to about 70-ish. In OECD nations life expectancy only seems to be about 5-10 years longer than in poorer countries despite the far higher amount of resources and medical technology in wealthy nations.
So are there other massively important medical advances that humanity would need to have decent enough health to start rebuilding ,or are controlling infectious disease and avoiding malnutrition basically the only major medical advances we need to have a society where most people can make it to age 70 w/o major health issues cutting into their productivity?
If we returned to the lifestyle (and presumably technological level) we enjoyed in the 1500’s then my guess is that pure survival would be the top priority…food, water and shelter. Priorities over that would probably be dropped in favor of those basic needs. The life expectancy into the 70’s wasn’t something that happened in general until the 20th century.
But assuming some kind of Mad Max end of the world scenario that left some humans alive, we’d probably retain at least some basic medical practices and basic hygiene and antiseptic procedures.
On top of what’s been mentioned, birth control. Both for reasons of social justice, and because having baby after baby until you die is bad for a woman’s health and lifespan.
Psalms 90 …
The days of our years are threescore years and ten
Mentioned again in MacBeth
Grandparents were not unusual…
if you managed to live past childhood, in general you lived to be fairly old. The only reason we consider the AVERAGE lifespan to be so young is the prevalence of infant and child death.
But it’s a UL. Sure, if you were well-off, then you could look forward to 60 or 70 once you made it out of childhood. But the poor back then were old at 40, or even 30. It’s a rough life working 12 hours a day, poor food, no medical care.
I don’t think germ theory was developed by 1500. If we could preserve the knowledge of what being “sick” actually is, it would go a long way toward giving people a better quality of life. Until we developed germ theory, medicine was all just shooting at the dark and rarely getting a lucky hit.
Social justice might have to adjusted or even sacrificed depending on the nature of the calamity, i.e. an asteroid hit has wiped out 90% of humanity (actually the world population in 1500 was less than 10% of current levels). We know much better how to keep babies alive and they might be higher priority than rebuilding a condom factory so after having three or four kids (not a huge number, certainly) women might just have to try the rhythym method for a while until we get things sorted out.
Sorry, ladies, I’m as pro-choice as it gets but under dire conditions I have to prioritize.
The rhythm method is pretty close to useless; as the old line goes, "We doctors have a technical term for women who use the rhythm method. We call them ‘mothers’. "
Also, the OP asked about lifespan; birth control is important for increasing female lifespan. You are also assuming that all women can contribute to rebuilding civilization is children.
That’s certainly not all they can contribute, but if there’s a massive die off, that’s a pretty big one. And if the catastrophe happens and we lose mechanization, then what becomes valuable is manual labor. The more kids you have to work the farm, the more you can produce, and the better chance everybody has of eating this year. So there’s going to be all sorts of social pressure to have big families, especially because infant mortality is going to be so high. So it’s likely in a society like that that a fertile woman is going to be pregnant most of the time, and people are going to say the hell with social justice.
I have to agree with the others on this one. If we go back to a 15th century technology base, then birth control would not be a priority…quite the opposite. Remember what the infant mortality was in the 15th century, even among the elite of the time. Also, we are talking about going back to times where manual labor is critical…and so you are going to need a lot of humans about to do it. Assuming there is a large die off of the population to go along with the huge drop in technology level then you are going to need babies…LOTS of babies.
Once you get the population stable again and your technology starts to rise, THEN you may want to revive birth control (I doubt it will be lost in any case…certainly there are several herbal methods that are at least partially useful).
No, you’re incorrectly assuming that I’m assuming that. My point, which should have been obvious enough, is that birth control is going to be of relatively low importance in the event of global catastrophe. If we’re smart about it, we won’t have a return of typhus and cholera and lots of other diseases that kept the infant mortality rate outrageously high right up to the early 20th century (in the western countries at least - it’s still high elsewhere) so what children are born have a decent chance to surivive - thus it won’t be necessary for women to have ten or more kids at the considerable risk to their own health just to ensure half of them make it to their first birthday.
I can think of ten or twenty major medical rebuilds that are of greater importance than restoring a steady a supply of contraceptives. Sorry, ladies; if you don’t want children, either pick a safe time of the month or go without vaginal intercourse for now, because making sure we have clean water and sanitation and some kind of refrigeration and sufficient food and adequate heat and clean bandages and antiseptics and whatnot is going to take precedence.
Not maximum population growth, but lifespan. And forcing women to have baby after baby was historically one of the biggest factors in a shorter female lifespan.
Not really, since you are postulating an arrangement where they won’t be able to do much else.
If we drop back to a 1500 century life style how big a priority do you suppose having women live longer would be? Groups who controlled their population would end up being squeezed out by groups who expanded their populations. In order to survive at 15th century technology levels you are going to need large pools of labor…which is going to necessitate large numbers of babies (especially considering infant mortality rates at those tech levels).
I seriously don’t think birth control would be a priority…not until we managed to drag ourselves back to 19th or 20th century tech levels anyway. The thing is, there are health care techniques and technology one would WANT to keep (antibiotics, for instance), but if we regress that far it won’t be a matter of what we want to keep…it will be a matter of keeping only that which helps the survivors to keep going.
None; I expect women would be reduced to slavery in all but name, and that birth control would be banned and existing stocks destroyed. But that’s not what the OP was asking.
And yet, the Fertility Awareness Method is, when used properly, about as effective as the pill. Just to be clear, the “rhythm” method IS a crock o’ baby poo, because it relies on calendars to predict ovulation. FA utilizes the physical signs and symptoms of a woman’s body to establish the onset and decline of fertility. Quite possible to control fertility (either to conceive or avoid conception) using this method. I did it for many years.
Re’ the OP’s question, historically it is pretty clear that advances in sanitation, clean water, living conditions, food preservation and availability had more to do with the reduction of infectious disease and extension of the lifespan than all medical advances combined.
The one exception is possibly antibiotics, and that might prove the biggest challenge, considering that even today, many are being rendered ineffective by overuse and mis-use and the resulting rise of resistant organisms. So making sure we had effective antibiotics available, and using them very discriminatingly, would be a top priority after the basic needs mentioned above were met.
Forget birth control. With 1500 technology you could have clean water, sanitation, and antisepsis. You might have primitive antibiotics (pennicillin from bread mold) but they wouldn’t be very effective. You could have smallpos vaccinatiion, since that is low-tech, but smallpox should have been wiped out. Thanks to a few Muslim clerics, we will have the joys of polio again in the world and vaccination against it is rather high tech.
I am being kept alive by blood pressure pills, a pacemaker, statins, all of which are much too high-tech to worry about (and I don’t contribute much any more anyway–too bad for me).
I disagree with the fundamental premise of this thread.
Technology and know-how would not just randomly disappear because civilization collapses. A lot of things would be abandoned in place and we’d still have the products already made.
People aren’t going to forget germ theory or basic rules of heredity. Even if the average person doesn’t know how things are done, simply knowing that they can be would put us on a relatively accelerated path to recovering technology.
Basic food preparation techniques would rank pretty highly on my list. Making and drying sausages, salt and sugar curing whole meats, alkali treatment of maize, how to make cheese and butter, how to properly preserve fruits and vegetables, pickling… how to make or find the chemicals you need to do the above
You could still rip out an absorption refrigerator from an abandoned RV and build a fire under its separator coil and still have refrigeration for the stuff that had to be kept cold or frozen.