If all the medical books were suddenly destroyed and every one involved in medicine over the age of 30 suddenly left earth where might we be in 5 years?
Is the Internet destroyed as well? There are plenty of medical professionals under 30 and with the Internet as a resource they could probably carry on much as they have been.
With the Internet gone then all bets are off.
Medicine would still exist, but there would be no schools to train new doctors, which wouldn’t be a good thing.
Remember that the medical field existed, albeit in a primitive state, before modern medical books were widely available.
Lets say the internet still existed.
A lot of medical schools are A/V-recording their lectures, so even if the professors died, we might still have many of their lectures around. Maybe not at all the medical schools, but if shared, you could assemble a decent set.
Many people under 30 still have general medical knowledge as well as personal experiences with medicine and illness which varies from person to person, which could be pooled together and audited via trial and error, autopsies, clinical trials etc. It wouldn’t be advanced but I assume enough kernels to rebuild to a 1960s era of medicine in a relatively short period of time would be there.
At the very least the biggest and most important medical advances are public health advances (nutrition, good exercise, environmental toxins, fighting microbes) and most people know about those even if they aren’t involved in medicine.
You’re going to lose the most highly technically skilled physicians: The neurosurgeons, the cardiovascular and transplant surgeons, the interventional cardiology and radiology physicians. Most of those don’t get out of residencies/fellowships until they’re past 30. It’ll be hard to replace them, as you really need to train under a variety of skilled mentors and DO a lot of tough surgical cases to get good at that stuff. Expect to have a lot of surgical procedures we take for granted these days just not be available (unless you’ve got big bucks and a high tolerance for risk). Say so long to coronary bypasses, angioplasties and stents, limb reattachment, kidney and liver transplants, most spine and brain surgeries, and a large number of orthopedic procedures.
And while you’ll have a somewhat greater number of decently trained and boarded primary care physicians and general surgeons, they won’t have a lot of experience under their belt. I got my MD rather young (age 25) & I went right into primary care residency, but I was not out of my training until I was 28. The availability of laparoscopic surgery will be reduced.
Medicine would be very different very quickly, as new people tried to re-acquire the skills lost. The basic knowledge might be out there on the net, or in books, but translating that knowledge into navigating your way thru some trauma victim’s ruptured spleen & bowel, collapsed lung, and shattered pelvis at 2 AM will take some time.
For comparison sake, the lost art of making all wood bows and arrows was revived on a larger scale about 15 years ago or so. Making a bow and arrow is about 10,000 times less complicated than medicine. It took a good 10 years for the quality of the bows and fully understanding the physics behind them to come back up to speed.
Anecdotal side note: I have a friend in Minnesota who just spent a year in England studying bowyery. He’s back in the states and has started up a business making bows & arrows.
Is your friends name Jim? If so I know him.
Cameron. So, there’re at least two. Awesome!
blink blink blink Well then, they should have talked to the bowyers in the SCA, I know people making classical wooden longbows and the horn and wood compound bows from the 70s. I learned how to make linen bowstrings in 79 from one, and how to fletch arrows with linen string, horn glue and feathers from a different one.
[that I can knap flint arrowheads is totally different, I learned that from an archeologist I dated.]
There’s still the internet, so homeopathy and diet pills would become universally prescribed.
Not a great comparison, though, because that project was doubtlessly done by a few hobbyists in their spare time. In your scenario, the governments of the world would be pouring billions into replacing the lost knowledge.
They were doing a decent job on the bows back them but the performance levels still had not reached the level of performance expected from bows in the middle ages. The internet got about 10,000 more people involved in it and the level of performance edged its way up to where it should be. I was making bows for SCA members in the middle 90’s. The asiatic horn bows would be an exception to this as the art of making horn bows was maintained at some level by a select few around the world. We use flight shooting contests and chronos to monitor or progress and it seemd to peek about 5 years ago.
And every medical condition that doesn’t respond to homeopathy and diet pills will be written off as psychosomatic and stress induced.
One big thing is that we have an empirical research based mindset in the tradition of Galen. Many medieval doctors or even doctors of the 1700’s were trained by rote to use this treatment for a headache and that treatment for rheumatism and not to conduct experiments. If the new generation of doctors or wannabe doctors starts research anew, then I think we may be able to get back a lot of our knowledge and not fall into barbarous superstition where doctors prescribe mercury vapors for nosebleed and tropical island vacations for schizophrenia.