In the classic scifi short story “The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass” (that I learnt while researching this was a response to an older story) the eponymous hero travels back to 1BC and teaches modern medicine. The result is a population explosion and…
a horribly overpopulated earth, one of whose miserable inhabitants is sent back to assassinate Phineas Snodgrass before he carries out his mission
My (vaguely) factual question is would teaching modern medicine to the ancient world actually increase population all that much? Without the ability to make antibiotics, (most) antiseptics, or anesthetics, how would the average human life expectancy actually improve, even if everyone was aware of germ theory?
For the most part sanitary sewage or water systems wouldn’t be possible either. So would life expectancy actually increase that much? Child birth, would get less risky which would certain improve female life expectancy, but with no antibiotics, all you could do is make sure everyone involved washed their hands. Likewise I guess surgery would probably go from “almost certain death” to “very dangerous”, but would that increase life expectancy? Would this add up to a major population explosion?
If he went back to say, Ancient Rome or Greece or a lot of cultures in that time period there was no societal objection to birth control, abortion, or even infanticide so, presumably, such a society would be able to limit their population when it reached excess.
Other times and places you’d have an issue with many more births than deaths.
I suspect that the population was as large as it could be based on food constraints.
If you saved people who would otherwise die due to disease, someone else would starve to death.
Well the omission of that (or more Malthusian downward pressure on population) was my problem with the short story.
But the OP was specifically asking what mechanism there be for modern medicine (without industrialization or other technological advances) to increase wider life expectancy? Without access to antibiotics, sanitary water supplies or better food, how would knowledge of modern medicine in society as a whole help your average peasant in 1BC live longer? Other than getting your midwife to wash her hands.
I’m not sure how much of a statistical effect it would have-- but doctors would quit bleeding people to death.
I’m sure that at least a few outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, etc., would be prevented simply by knowing that there needs to be a distance between sewage areas and drinking water.
All of this pre-supposes that the increased population is due entirely (or at least largely) to medical advances. I would have thought that better nutrition and more available food, due to advances in agriculture had more influence.
Well the fact that actually starving to death (as opposed to falling victim to disease as you’ve been weakened by hunger) isn’t all that common in ancient times, suggests that. Of course that doesn’t mean (as beowulff suggests) that ultimately you would just cause more starvation if you did increase population.
As aside, though in Phineas’ reality they’d now be able to treat the acute vitamin deficiencies, like Scurvy, in many cases (which presumably were responsible for a many deaths in time of famine).
Medicine is definitely the crucial factor driving population growth in places like Africa over the last century or so. People tend to give birth to as many children as they used to, but nearly twice as many children are surviving now. Like the others, I’m not sure that this can be attributed to medicine alone, though. Even in poor areas of Africa, there are numerous other benefits (even if only indirect) from modern technology like transportation and communication.
I wonder if a healthier population might be a smarter population, and whether that could cause industrialization to occur earlier. Industrialization clearly slows the birth rate as children become an expense rather than an asset and so that might result in a lower population at the time traveler’s frame of reference. But there are a lot of factors that go into education and scientific achievement other than the health of the population.
Cleanliness is hugely important. It changes everything. You get mothers surviving childbirth and men surviving battle wounds. Many epidemics can be prevented just by cleaning out swamps. Clean milk prevents cholera epidemics. Moving sewage out of cities makes them much healthier. The largest gains in lifespans occurred in the half century after cities discovered cleanliness and before medications saved lives.
I’m not sure why the OP says sanitary sewage or water systems are impossible. The Romans built the Cloaca Maxima in 600 BC and had eleven huge aqueducts by 100 AD. Those allowed a population of a million to thrive in an area of about 5 sq. mi. That’s one of the densest populations in all history, comparable to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the tenement era.
Would the world get overpopulated? Probably not. There weren’t too many Romes. Only a handful of governments had the power, organization, and money to pull off these projects. Or to feed a million people. A few central cities would have gotten larger and maybe more large towns would appear. People wouldn’t have lived forever, though, and it’s not certain they’d have larger families if more kids survived childhood. The upper class in Victorian England seems to have had families about as large as the poor even though the poor had many more births.
People writing stories with twist endings never worry about negatives, either. The big one is that armies could be larger and have better targets. War kept populations down. So did famine and natural disasters, neither of which could be helped by modern medicine. Actually starving to death was probably the most common way to die. Famines killed off huge percentages of the population of every country with great regularity. Vitamin deficiencies affected sailors but not land populations, BTW.
Diseases evolve as well as people. Could clean Europeans have prevented the plague from spreading? We’re having little effect against Zika mosquitoes today.
Probably some net positive effects, but not overpopulation.
Quite possibly, or at least made it less dangerous. Or if not plague specifically, other diseases.
There’s a hypothesis that modern sanitation has in reality lowered the actual rate of infectious disease little if at all; instead what has happened is that cutting off the easy, involuntary methods of transmission like contaminated water has put evolutionary pressure on diseases to be more subtle and less virulent. The idea is that there’s always about as much disease around as the ecological niche of “humans” will support, but sanitation and medicine have selected for diseases that mostly avoid human notice, and thus avoid human efforts to suppress them.
I badly need a cite on this. I don’t believe it for even one second. “Hypothesis” is usually code word for some fringe notion unsupported by evidence that got traction on the Internet. Worse, it sounds like something the nutcase anti-vaxxers made up.
Teaching modern medicine might also include knowledge of statistics and scientific methodology. These would propel industrialization, with all its good and bad effects on population.
Even if you did not include those in the ‘package’, just knowing about what was possible would create a drive to understand and replicate more (unless the whole package was couched in religious or semi-religious terms, received from authority).
A couple of years ago, National Geographic had an article about today’s world population. One of the scientists they interviewed stated that, wherever women have access to education and birth control, the birthrate drops below replacement level.
If that is the case, then introducing modern medicine might make Rome fall to the barbarians even faster than it did in the real world.
A lot of factors have to come together before you get industrialization. And, well… I’m sorry, but this sentence has been very gently tickling one of those berserker buttons at the back of my mind for days now, even though I really don’t think you meant it that way. So I think I’ll just throw the following out there, in a general sort of way, just to get it off my chest:
Look, people in the past weren’t stupid. I’ve been spending a lot of time with ancient history lately, and I see no indication that (for instance) the Romans were any less clever than we are. They lived in a world that was different from ours in many ways, sure. But to question their smarts just because they didn’t have internal combustion engines or iPods feels a bit like the people in the Star Trek universe suggesting that people today are dumb, since we don have warp drives or replicators, and we haven’t cured cancer yet. I’m not too comfortable with that notion. If Will Riker was to say such a thing, I think I would find it insulting. And I would tell him that he was misinformed.
I absolutely agree that the ancients really had their “shit” together, intellectually. A lot of their solutions to problems includes a much of what we would think as “out of the box” thinking- I’m not sure what they thought of it.
They did still lack some intellectual tools, and I would argue that introduction to modern medicine, if it included a discussion of scientific method and statistics, would have rocked their world. This stuff is embedded in medicine now- they might even be able to figure those out without explicit instruction.
This brings up an interesting point. The story was written by Fred Pohl in 1962. That’s two years after “the pill” was introduced. Does the story mention this?
This story has lots of issues. For example, what does the story call “modern medicine?” Does germ theory get you very far without microscopes? Wouldn’t it be just another theory and a pretty weird one at that? And do you have medicine without evolution? And if you get evolution, then modern agriculture wouldn’t be far behind. I suspect you’ll get a population explosion stopped only by the invention of television. The internet will soon follow.
Could he go back another century and have an argument with Galen? And does this mean that when Malthus showed up he would just be Captain obvious?