Bring out the leeches, Ma!

My kids brought home an Infectious Disease notification from school the other day. It was for Scarlet Fever, which surprised me, because I’d always thought that was one of those old-timey diseases that nobody got anymore. 

    S: “Old-timey”?
    M: You know – like the plague.
    S: I wasn’t questioning your information, but rather your insistence on inventing silly words.

Of course many diseases were just known by different names in the past. These days we like to sound knowledgeable. So ‘the ague’ is malarial fever, ‘dropsy’ is oedema, ‘green sickness’ is anaemia. Syphilis was known as ‘bad blood’, ‘Great Pox’ and our favourite – ‘French Pox’ – because when in doubt, blame France. 

Illness has lost its aura of mystery and romance. No longer can we harbour visions of people fading away with the rather vague sounding ‘consumption’. Instead we are aware at an almost cellular level of exactly what the process of each disease is and what treatments are available. 

    S: My grandmother had a ‘Family Medicine Almanac’, quite possibly printed during the reign of Queen Victoria, which she referred to for all illnesses. Talk about your doom and gloom. Just about everything, from chicken pocks and measles to ingrown toenails, was fatal. 

Nowadays we can just ‘google’ our various symptoms and let Dr Internet provide us with a diagnosis. Feeling tired and nauseous with a bad headache? You will find diagnoses ranging from chronic fatigue to vitamin deficiency. Surprisingly, your computer appears to be unaware that the cause is more likely to be the fact that you were out partying with friends until the early hours of the morning and that you managed to spend your entire weekly grocery budget on alcohol. 

Even the most benign of diagnoses sounds downright frightening on the net because all you get are the Worst Case Scenarios. No one goes online to talk about their wart that healed quickly and painlessly with the right medication. It’s all about the “and then it turned into a giant festy sore that consumed my whole right leg” stories, proving that Grandma’s almanac wasn’t far wrong. But at least on the internet you can download pictures to gross out your friends, and that is pretty cool.