jlf1961
Posts: 14840
Joined: 6/10/2008
From: Somewhere Texas
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: WhoreMods
For an interesting question about purism, I wonder how many of the attendees have been disfigured or crippled by polio or smallpox? How many of them have had their teeth yanked and replaced by wooden dentures? Anybody present with untreated syphillis or TB?
I appreciate that an iphone is an anachronism, but so's shaving with anything that won't slice your nose off if you twitch at the wrong moment, or having type one diabetes over the age of thirty five and not being dead in that context. Like everything else, purism can be taken too far, dig?
Interesting you brought up disease.
Polio was fairly rare prior to the 1900's which have some speculating it may have been an ancient virus, considering the first known outbreak was 1841 in Louisiana.
As for small pox, many Europeans and those of European descent had a natural resistance to the disease, again while epidemics were frequent, survivors among white anglo saxons and european descended stock was high.
But then again, there was a mutation of the small pox virus that began to show up in the late 1800's bringing back the deadly pandemics by the early 1900's.
As for the STD's, prior to penicillin, they were treated with sulfa drugs (in fact Blackbeard once blockaded Charleston Harbor and didnt left the blockade until the city delivered enough doses of the sulfa/mercury treatment to his ship.) Again, for almost 2 centuries, sulfa drugs were an effective treatment against most STD's.
Initial treatment was far from pleasant. Upon discovering symptoms, the medical practitioner (in some cases, the local barber) would mix the treatment (either sulfur or sulfur and mercury) in an alcohol or water solution, and using a syringe, inject it directly into the proper openings, in the male, that was the urethra, in female patients, the vaginal opening and the urethra. Treatment was repeated every two days for about a week.
If caught in time, 70% effective, but if the person giving the treatment used the mercury solution, you might end up with mercury poisoning.
Now, interestingly enough, there were more effective herbal remedies that originated in China.
As to wooden teeth, while the more common form of dental replacement (about 2 bucks a set) other possible solutions were made from ivory, precious metals, even spent bullet casings (also a quick way to seal a cavity.) A full set of Ivory dentures could cost you $10 in the big cities like Kansas City, St. Louis, or Chicago. In the gold country, gold teeth would cost you an couple of ounces of dust and you provide your own gold to make the teeth out of.
Diabetes was less of a problem before processed foods since sugar was a fairly expensive commodity. Hard rock candy was a luxury then, the average price of a pound of sugar was about 2 bucks, and in the 1800's that was a lot. Most people used molasses as a sweetener.
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You cannot control who comes into your life, but you can control which airlock you throw them out of.
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