Healdsburg in the 1918 flu epidemic
EDITOR: One of my patients, Evelyn Iversen, was one of those great Healdsburg women, and she told me about her experiences in the flu epidemic of 1918, which killed millions of people worldwide. Her family owned the Home Dairy, the family business, and this is what she told me in 2005, at age 96, during one of the Ebola outbreaks. She recalled delivering milk during the 1918 epidemic (I am old enough to remember milk delivery); if a family was known to have the flu, they would still deliver the milk but not pick up the empty bottles until the family was well. Then they would sterilize the bottles separately. No one in their family ever got the flu. Evelyn lived to be 104, and she was a great example for her family as they contributed much to the Healdsburg community.
David Anderson, MD
Healdsburg
Short-term look from here
EDITOR: Ignorance is bliss. It used to be that people who didn’t have knowledge about current events and scientific understanding would keep their thoughts mostly to themselves, in part for fear that others would think they were uninformed or stupid. Today’s world must be a different place because apparently, for many Americans, these shortcomings have become a badge of identity. These people promote a charade, believing the incredible, refusing to accept information they don’t understand or don’t like (or have not learned). They band together as if by consensus they can overcome reality and create what they want to believe. They seem to believe that scientific fact is a choice, as if they can choose the facts and the science they like in the same way they go to the polls and vote for whichever candidate pleases them, and the majority would win. Cellphones are okay, but masks are not. This is not just about masks.
People should have more respect for science, not to mention history. How do they think they got their cellphones, the ability to fly in airplanes, electricity … ? There will be a note about these people in history, should civilization survive long enough to look back at this era — a wacko, self-destructive cult, like a mass version of Jonestown, perverted by elements in their surroundings of which they have no understanding, and enabled by people who know better, who exploit this ignorance for their own gain. Either that or the rest of us will eventually die out, leaving such humans as remain living in caves and stumbling over the ruins of higher civilization as they hunt for food and look for fruit to gather.
A large portion of my parents’ generation was college-educated, thanks to the G.I. bill after World War II. At that time many adults read books. My generation benefited from a surge in public education funding, spurred by American reaction to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. In the period when I grew up, public education was pretty good.
Since then, with the dumbing down of the public, people don’t exhibit the same critical thinking skills. The internet, new forms of mass communication and commercialization everywhere have given voice to many “viewpoints” and with the rise of extreme capitalism, anti-social and anti-science viewpoints have been politically exploited. Big money has a heavy hand in what “information” is available, and which news stories and television shows get prominence. And many of us, lazy as we are, pretty much take whatever is offered, without much thought or analysis.
I shouldn’t care. I’m old and I’m going to die and it won’t affect me that much. But those who are younger will have to live in this world, if they can. I care about them, and all the human misery I can see as almost inevitable. And preventable. There are still some things we can do to make the future a habitable place for our children and their children, although these options are becoming more uncertain as I write.
Michael Rosen
Healdsburg
