Wednesday, May 15, 2013
When time-traveling, always remember a doctor…
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| The second, fourth and tenth Doctor always ready to handle a medical emergency. |
Science fiction is replete with ways to travel through time.
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H.G. Wells Time Machine may be a Steampunk fan's
dream, but there's no room for a doctor.
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But if I had my choice of how I got to travel through time, I’d choose an old, beat-up, British Police Box, piloted by a lonely, eccentric old man with the coolest case of Multiple Personality Disorder – er, I mean, Dissociative Identity Disorder – in the universe.
By now you’ve probably figured that I am referring to the TARDIS from the long-running BBC TV show “Doctor Who.” Sure it’s impossibly bigger on the inside than it is on the out, and style wise it alternates between looking like a ship made of cast off cardboard packing materials to a place constructed completely out of spare parts.
So why choose the TARDIS?
Because of the guy who flies it. His name is derived from the word we use to describe our healers: doctor. And in the 50 years he has been gallivanting around time and space on out TV sets, he’s shown he knows his fair share about medicine.
As I post this blog, I am still recovering from a pretty bad case of double pneumonia. You don’t hear much about pneumonia these days except around cold and flu time when doctors recommend you get vaccinated against both these diseases. Everyone thinks pneumonia is a minor illness now. Sure it used to kill millions, but with the invention of penicillin we’ve licked it! Today people think it’s no worse than a bad chest cold.
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Okay, so this DeLorean comes with a doctor, but would you
trust a guy who steals plutonium from Libian terrorists to
treat you when your sick.
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I can now tell you from first-hand experience that it’s not. It’s every bit as bad as it ever used to be.
And the most insidious thing about pneumonia is how quickly it sneaks up on you before almost totally incapacitating you.
On the Friday they captured the Boston Marathon bomber suspect, I came home from work with a mild-to-strongish headache, which I assumed had been triggered by my spring allergies. By Monday the headache had gotten worse enough that it actually drove me to see my doctor without anybody having to talk me into it first. By Wednesday I had to leave work early because my simple headache had grown about a thousand times worse and been joined by chills (and probably an intermittent fever), a cough that was bringing up mucus, fast heartbeat and as you’d expect, exhaustion.
By Friday I was back at my doctor’s office and was sent home with some antibiotics. I gave these new drugs some time to work, because for a while in the mornings I’d feel a teeny-tiny bit better. But by the end of the day, I’d feel even worse. By Tuesday I knew something was really wrong and by the time I actually got to see my doctor instead of one of his assistants, he knew I had pneumonia almost right away and admitted me to the hospital.
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| The Taredis may lack style, but at least
it comes with it's own doctor!
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Well it gave me a lot of time to just lie around and think about thing
s. Things like what the town I live in looked like 100 years ago and what might have happened to me if I had caught pneumonia back then.
Among the time periods I’ve always wanted to travel back in time and experience was the era that began just prior to World War I and ended with the beginning of Prohibition. I always considered this period the real “start” of the 20th Century. In 1900 the United States was still primarily a nation of farmers. But right around that 1912-1914 mark something happened and America “turned the corner” and quickly began heading down the road that would make it the world’s leading industrial giant. In those few short years, America blossomed into the “modern” country we now recognize.
Part of this fantasy was walking down my current home town’s main street and seeing it appear not so radically different than it appears today. By 1914-1915 automobiles were already beginning to replace the horse, so I’d still see cars outside the shops and homes along Broad Street. They’d just be Model Ts instead of SUVs, minivans and sedans.
Also since electrification followed the railways out in the suburbs and my town used to be a major rail stop between New York and Philadelphia, it follows some of the many houses built in our town at this time were built with electric in mind rather than gas. Hence the electric poles would be there and perhaps even a few of the electric street lights I take for granted each night.
Even the fashions worn by my town’s men-folk wouldn’t be all that utterly unrecognizable. Sure their cardboard collars looked formal and stiff, but the business suits they wore weren’t really that radically different from what my dad used to wear to work each day when I was growing up in the 1970s.
I guess I thought experiencing this time period would be like walking through those old-timey sepia-toned photos we see in books about the second decade of the 20th century. And I guess that’s the fault of time-travel shows like “Doctor Who.” They seldom dwell on the darker-side of time travel, instead focusing their time on the fun and adventure of experiencing a bygone age.
We aren’t often reminded that the “good old days” came with things like the Pneumonia Pandemic of 1918 that killed 600,000 people in the United States and more than 25 million people worldwide. In 1918 there weren’t any antibiotics yet, as the discovery of penicillin was still 10 years away, so people who caught it, either burned with fever until their bodies developed an antibody to the virus, or died. Given how I felt during those first 14 days before I got to the hospital, I can easily understand why so many people died, and it wasn’t a pleasant way to go.
So fellow time travelers, you can keep your Steampunk flying chairs and fancy sports cars.
I’ll wait for the time machine that comes with its own doctor any day of the week.
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