Killing Us Softly Read Online Free PDF

century,” said Osler, “than the ancient Greeks.”
    T hen medicine took a giant leap forward. Healers no longer believed that illnesses were a matter of spiritual will or humoral imbalances; rather, they defined diseases in biochemical and biophysical terms. This revolution in medical thought centered on several defining moments:
    In 1796, Edward Jenner, a country doctor working in southern England, found he could protect people from smallpox by inoculating them with cowpox, a related virus. Jenner’s vaccine eliminated smallpox—a disease that had killed as many as 500 million people—from the face of the earth. By inducing the immunity that follows natural infection without having to pay the price of natural infection, vaccines have dramatically reduced deaths from rabies, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, measles, rubella, hepatitis, chickenpox, rotavirus, influenza, yellow fever, typhoid, and meningitis.
    In 1854, John Snow, a British physician, investigated an outbreak of cholera in London that had killed more than six hundred people. Snow traced the problem to a water pump on Broad Street. After he removed the pump handle, the outbreak stopped. Snow’s observation launched the field of epidemiology and lifesaving sanitation programs.
    In 1876, Robert Koch, a German physician, isolated the bacteria that cause anthrax. Knowing that specific bacteria caused specific diseases, scientists could now find ways to treat them.
    In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a Scottish biologist, noticed that a mold (
Penicillium notatum
) growing in broth was excreting a substance that killed surrounding bacteria. He called it penicillin. Once-fatal diseases were now treatable.
    In 1944, Oswald Avery, an American scientist, found that DNA was the substance from which genes and chromosomes were made, allowing disorders like sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis to be defined in genetic terms.
    But it was a relatively unknown Scottish surgeon who—fifty years
before
Jenner’s smallpox vaccine—made the single greatest contribution to medical thought. In 1746, James Lind climbed aboard the HMS
Salisbury
, determined to find a cure for scurvy, a disease common among sailors that caused bleeding, anemia, softening of the gums, loss of teeth, kidney failure, seizures, and occasionally death. Lind divided twelve sailors into six groups of two. One pair received a quart of cider every day; the second, twenty-five drops of sulfuric acid three times a day; the third, two spoonfuls of vinegar three times a day; the fourth, a pint of seawater; the fifth, garlic, mustard, radish root, and myrrh gum; and the sixth, two oranges and a lemon. Lind found that only fruits cured scurvy. In 1795, fifty years later, the British Admiralty ordered a daily ration of lime juice for sailors, and scurvy disappeared. (British citizens have been called limeys ever since.)
    Although Lind had proved that citrus fruits cured scurvy, he didn’t know why. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that aHungarian biochemist named Albert Szent-Györgyi isolated the substance later called vitamin C, or ascorbic acid (literally, “an acid against scurvy”). Lind’s study was groundbreaking because it was the first prospective, controlled experiment ever performed, paving the way for evidence-based medicine. No longer did people have to
believe
in certain therapies; they could test them.
    V accines, antibiotics, sanitation, purified drinking water, and better hygiene allowed people to live longer. From the beginning to the end of the twentieth century, the life span of people living in developed world countries had increased by thirty years. None of this increase occurred because healers balanced humors, restored
chi
, or offered sacrifices to the gods; it occurred because we finally understood what caused diseases and how to treat or prevent them.
    I n a sense,
The Dr. Oz Show
is a voyage back through the history of medicine, starting