This Might Cheer You Up
February 10th, 2019This might cheer you up. Since Homo sapiens first walked the Earth either upright or dragging their knuckles some 50,000 years ago, more than 108 billion members of our species have been born. Here’s where the cheer comes in, of those 100+ billion people only a small percentage have enjoyed the creature comforts you and I are enjoying right now. I’m talking cars, heat/AC, indoor plumbing, airplanes, etc. Hell there are millions of people in 2019 that have no indoor plumbing. Hello India. I don’t know what’s worse, knowing these comforts exist and not having access to them or living at a time when they hadn’t been invented yet. I guess things balanced out in that people who lived over 100 years ago only lived to be 36. When cars were invented the richest person then, owned a car that didn’t have half of the items the average car has today. John D. Rockefeller was worth 340 billion dollars in today’s money but his version of a heated car seat would’ve been a pan of hot coals underneath his rumble seat. Hey nice tophat John. But all that aside let’s just be thankful for anesthesia. Let’s give a fist bump to William T.G. Morton, an American dentist who first publicly demonstrated the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic in 1846. Prior to ether, surgery was avoided as much as possible and it consisted of the patient being strapped to a chair or held down by several people. Let’s review; before anesthesia you felt every excruciating moment of surgery, and then if you survived that ordeal you went home to no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and no television. Now you can have heart surgery, not feel a thing, in fact the drugs are so good it is total nirvana, and then you can head home usually the same day, in your car with the cup holders. And then when you get home just ask Alexa who has the best pizza in your area and order up. Now don’t you feel much better?
Gunga Galungya,
Garry
Older: « Dead of Winter