We Know So Little and Should Not Act Otherwise

Look at the chart above. (H/t: MR.) COVID has been unacceptably awful in terms of body count, and the 1918 influenza was even worse.  But notice how much greater mortality was in urban New York in the 1800s.   

The notion of germs started to take root in the 1850s, but it took decades for it to become mainstream.  What took so long?  Doctors were a leading cause of death because, absent understanding how germs went, they transmitted disease to their next patients through their lab coats and their unwashed hands.  And even as the science definitively proved that unseen germs existed and were the cause of infection, doctors struggled with the possibility that they, the good guys against disease and death, were actually the carriers of it.

From 150 years later, it is easy to be incredulous at both the lack of understanding of germs and the lack of humility from the doctors.  Ah, but the future will look back at us with similar incredulity.  We have learned and progressed so much, it is true.  But we know so little.  Here's to a little more humility as a result, and while I'm at it, here's to infecting our kids with the sort of love of science that will help them grow into the innovators who help us figure out what we should've known all along.