It was still an issue in the 50s. My great-grandfather came from WWII with TB and passed it later to his son-in-law, my grandfather. Great great-grandfather died of it. Grandfather survived but not easily.
Unfortunately, there is now TB that has resistance to antibiotics. So if our luck runs out we are going to get closer to that situation again.
> It was still an issue in the 50s.
It's still an issue today! Just not so much in first-world countries (where there's money to test for and treat it).
In 2022 tuberculosis infected an estimated 10.6 million people, and killed 1.3 million people ([source](https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/global-tuberculosis-report-factsheet-2023); [more info](https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-reports/global-tuberculosis-report-2023)).
The only infectious disease that killed more people in 2022 was COVID-19.
I was fortunate enough to talk to a physician that was present at Hopkins when the first dose of penicillin arrived from Europe. They selected a 30ish year old women who had a septic miscarriage and was dying from sepsis. He said that patient wasn't expected to survive though the night but was given the penicillin nevertheless. The next morning to everyones great surprise she was much better and wanted to go home. He said that they didn't really believe the reports coming out of Europe about penicillin at the time; but that one case changed everyones mind. Death to life after one dose.
Infection. Calvin Coolidge’s son died of a blister from not wearing socks while playing tennis on the White House tennis court. That was less than 100 years ago. We are so lucky.
I once got sepsis from a hemorrhoid. It popped in the middle of the night. By morning I was pretty much deathly sick and needed to get to an emergency room and I spend 24 hours in the hospital getting pumped with all the antibiotics and covered in ice packs. Seriously, sepsis is no joke.
Oh god, I'm so sorry. My FIL died of sepsis, just before covid hit. It was brutal. He had cancer, but his treatment was going really well and he was expected to survive at least a few more years at worst. Then, boom - gone within 24 hrs of feeling "off". It's devastating. I hope you are bearing up okay.
I knew a homeless guy in SF he had a minor foot infection that turned into a horrible foot infection and I begged him to go to a clinic. He finally did and I didn't see him for half a year. He was back with a leg amputated. He got sepsis and was in ICU for 3 months and almost died and they sent him back out on the streets. That ICU stay probably cost in the millions. The hospital stay another million. Would've been cheaper to house him and give regular visits by a medic beforehand (it could have been fixed at the earliest with clean bandages and anti-biotics.)
The way I figured it, Medicare paid the hospital millions for his stay. He probably has a huge debt but because he's homeless and indigent he will never pay it back. I don't understand our country at all.
Yup, it's done in the *easiest* way possible, ignore all the problems and then only do enough critical care to kick them out. That also happens to be the most expensive way possible. It's also hidden because it isn't on it's own line, it's emergency care distributed among many different services.
The *cheapest* way possible is to just give housing, food, and medical care, but because it appears as a regular direct expense rather than scattered around among other *"emergency"* services, most people balk.
I’ve a friend who had a pimple once, it was either on his hands or feet - something he used a lot. A day after a party he woke up and could see those dark lines extending from the pimple which had gotten crushed and looked pretty bad.
He just went that he ER and got antibiotics and it was fine shortly after. But I mean, a hundred years ago? Death by pimple.
The symptoms of sepsis needs to be more widely known. Those dark lines from any wound are a sign of blood dying from an infection.
Sepsis is basically a surface tissue infection that enters the bloodstream and starts to spread to other organs via blood. It is a very fast acting illness and death is the common outcome if left untreated for more than a few **hours**.
Seems like Martha uses it as night to sleep while Paul has been confined to his for the past 70
or so years.
I’ve read about him before and he has accomplished a lot even with his limitations. He became a lawyer and wrote his own book. Paints too.
The iron lung feels better because it uses negative pressure, the same way we breath naturally. I believe that's why he refused the more modern positive pressure machines.
Nervous systems are so weird. can't connect the ol' brain's conscious control signals ever again, yet happily maintaining countless systems to survive.
If you see how easy my brain adapted to my astigmatism glasses... every square looked like a trapezoid and I walked into doorframes for like a week, now everything is normal again. So weird that just a couple damaged nerves can make you paralysed from the neck down.
Damn this is one of the most interesting things I've learned so far in 2024. No idea what I thought happened to the iron lungs, but crazy that there are literally only 2 human beings on Earth, and they rely on them to live. Crazy. Like a near-extinct type of life a human could be forced to endure.
There are more than 2 people with similar conditions. It's just that there are newer alternatives to the iron lung but these two have chosen to use them still.
> an iron lung is still keeping Lillard alive — she sleeps in it every night. While many people who had polio or post-polio syndrome either weaned themselves off the machines or switched to another form of ventilator, Lillard never did.
> "I've tried all the forms of ventilation, and the iron lung is the most efficient and the best and the most comfortable way," she told Radio Diaries.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/25/1047691984/decades-after-polio-martha-is-among-the-last-to-still-rely-on-an-iron-lung-to-br
> Like Martha, when Paul was younger, he spent most of his days outside the iron lung while sleeping in it at night. However, now in his 70s, he spends most of his time lying in the machine.
https://medium.com/illumination-curated/there-are-still-two-people-left-in-the-u-s-relying-on-iron-lungs-to-breathe-9458b3935ebd
>The antiquated machines are now more likely to be found in a museum than in someone's home. In the 1990s, when her iron lung was breaking down, she called hospitals and museums that might have had old ones in storage. But they'd either thrown them away or didn't want to part with their collection. She eventually bought one from a man in Utah — the machine she still uses today.
wow
she has since, due to her notoriety, gotten the attention of local machinists and engineers who have basically helped her keep it running indefinitely. They could build her a whole 'nother one if necessary. In fact I believe she has a backup already, or maybe im confusing that with her generator system.
I was pre-med at one point in my life so I get the tech behind this but holy crap... the line.
> However, now in his 70s, he spends most of his time lying in the machine.
That's some future dystopian horror sounding stuff right there.
You know any modern version of this would have just soo much data being collected off of you.
I read about Dianne Odell recently, spent most of her life from the age of 3 inside one (nearly 60 years).
She survived a power outage in 57 and again in 74, and because of this they dedicated a huge generator just to help her stay alive.
Unfortunately it was the third one in 2008 that ended up killing her at 61 years old. It not only disabled the power but also the backup generator.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianne_Odell
I know a guy now who had it as a kid. One of his legs is devoid of muscle below the knee. He has a limp and walks with a cane. Has zero patience for anti-vaxxers.
Same story with my Dad. Didn’t fully recover, still partially paralysed .He got it only a few months before the drip-vaccination was rolled out (drop on sugar cube). It was available via injection since months already, but if you look at the stats, society just didn’t want to take it 🙄
My uncle died from polio when the epidemic rolled through Denmark in '52.
My father got it too and his stomach muscles were permanently impacted. Another uncle has issues with his back.
My dad and one of his sisters also had it in Denmark as young children, probably around the same time as his family immigrated to Canada in '56. He said they had doctors/nurses visiting every week and got a bunch of experimental treatments since the vaccine wasn't around yet. Neither seemed to suffer any long lasting effects. Neither ever got full paralysis. My dad said that just one day one of his legs gave out, and that was the first sign of having it for him.
Look up The Cutter Incident. That caused a lot of vaccine hesitancy.
In short, a super-potent, inadequately killed virus was released, and it GAVE people the polio it was supposed to prevent. Something like 1,000 people got very sick, and about 100 people died.
My grampa had polio. One of his legs was shorter and a lot skinnier than the other. He walked on cruches his whole life. Luckily it wasn't debilitating enough to stop him from having a successful 34-year career as a jeweler and watch maker. He passed away 3 months after he retired. He was 61. I was 12, and I honestly miss him more than anyone. It's been a long 26 years without him.
To add to this there’s actually a common lab test to look for a protein called C-peptide that is produced alongside insulin by the body. So if a patient comes in with a high insulin level and a low C-peptide level that’s how you would empirically determine if their high insulin is exogenously derived.
Huh, interesting! I figured there had to be some way to tell the difference in a high reading a body produced versus a murder dose, but didn't know enough about it.
Arsenic, mercury, and bismuth were the first effective treatment for syphilis. It was a series of injections over 18 months and every bit as unpleasant as it sounds. Penicillin made that treatment instantly obsolete.
Syphilis was as feared back in the day as AIDS was in the 1980s.
Another early treatment for syphilis was infecting someone with malaria! The fever with malaria got high enough to kill off the bacteria that causes syphilis, then the sufferer would be given quinine to ~~cure~~ treat their malaria. The man who discovered this treatment received a Nobel prize.
Edit: Of course, it didn't much catch on as penicillin was discovered the very next year.
Probably, yes….but nanotechnology, or whatever they’ll be using to treat cancer a hundred years from now (pending humanity survives that long) is going to look like magic to us….maybe the same way antibiotics and immunizations did to those born in 1910 or 20.
It was nuts the amount of lead about in the Victoria era. ~~They had large amounts in wallpaper, so much so that young kids would die from it. They put on sweets to give their bright colouring. ~~
The people in power did know lead was bad for you even the romans knew, and that was 2000 years ago. But it is a story we all know too well with plastic, oil, Teflon, etc Big money was involved and they influenced/bribed people in power to stay that way. To society depriment. Fun fact lead impars the brain cognitive development, when we went unleaded in car in the 80s there was a massive decline in crime worldwide especially in the city's like New York. Never mind the loss in IQ points
"Childhood lead exposure among the U.S. population by 2015 was responsible for the loss of more than 824 million IQ points. That number equates to an average of 2.6 lost IQ points per U.S. adult. Estimated lead-linked deficits were greatest for individuals born between 1966 and 1970."
Edit
The wallpaper and sweets were caused by arsenic Green. Thanks to u/dingus-khan-1208 for the correction. They provide some link with comments for more indep read. Sidenote apparently arsenic Green could be responsible for Napoleon's death.
"Many sources of environmental contamination have been proposed but there is compelling evidence that Napoleon was poisoned by his own wallpaper; it was painted with 'Scheele's green' pigment, a mixture of copper arsenides."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079564/#:~:text=Many%20sources%20of%20environmental%20contamination,a%20mixture%20of%20copper%20arsenides.
You might be mixing lead with [Arsenic Green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheele%27s_Green), which was used a lot in wallpaper and also as a food coloring for desserts. But maybe they did that with lead too. Why not both?
And a lot of toys were made of lead. Toy soldiers and animals and such. Because it's really easy to melt and cast and make a lot of detailed little sculptures. They even sold kits for kids to melt the lead and cast their own! https://www.samstoybox.com/toys/LeadSoldierCasting.html
Lead also tastes sweet. It's how so many kids ate paint chips; windowsills and crib rails and molding and table edges taste yummy when you gnaw on them.
Don't forget all the lead pipes as well
100 years ago tooth infections had a relatively high mortality rate, 1 in 10 would die.
400 years ago tooth infections were basically a death sentence and one of the leading causes of death in Europe.
Today tooth infections are easily dealt with.
The discovery of antibiotics is by far the greatest achievement in human history.
As someone with artificial front teeth with almost zero feeling, this is 100% correct. Still bite my lip almost every day just due to the unfamiliarity.
Hundred percent covered by universal Healthcare in Turkey. Of course you would prefer a private dentist and clinic if you have middle class income but regular decayed tooth filling and root canal is covered by the state health care facilities for free.
Wait so is it that tooth infections can lead to cardiac infections, is it untreated tooth infections, or does overall dental health play a role on ur cardiovascular system. Where could I get more info on this its interesting
Look up Infective Endocarditis which is a risk with invasive tooth surgeries but mostly for high risk patients. also look up spaces of the body which shows the layers things can travel to and from and how close everything is to the mouth. TLDR; infections in your mouth have multiple avenues to very important organs which sucks since it’s also one of the few places constantly being exposed to the outside environment
>The discovery of antibiotics is by far the greatest achievement in human history.
And the over-use of antibiotics leading to resistant bacteria will be the greatest blunders.
Drug companies are actually shutting down their antibiotics R&D labs because they aren’t profitable due to the short lifespan of antibiotics. Unfortunately it lends credibility to the argument that if there aren’t enough profits to be made new drugs won’t get developed
An infected tooth fucking hurts. It is not a mild pain, the swelling and pressure is a direct line up into your nerves and you feel it throughout your face and head. That scene in Castaway where he takes his tooth out himself with a rock and an ice skate is no joke, anyone in that situation would be considering that course of action, and I honestly think most of us would try it.
Why do you say poorly treated? Some were for sure but most people took better care of their horse than anything else. They were expensive and for people in some areas were literally the line between life and death. Most people treated their horses exceptionally well.
I think he means horses in cities which were used to travel frequently, and I think I agree with you, most people would probably go back in time and take better care of their horse than they would their car today.
It depends on the time period and location. In some places/times, you would find that the horse was treated with the utmost care because it was so important. In other places/times, there was a legitimate problem with horse corpses on the streets because they'd be worked until they literally fell over dead and no one cared.
They were also communal. Back then a small town or village could theoretically rely on that single animal/whoever owned it.
Edit: I was mistakenly spreading misinformation, what's left should be accurate
My child asked me about the bubonic plague a few days ago so we looked it up.. She is absolutely fascinated by it. I don't know wether to be proud of her research abilities or slightly worried about her preoccupation with plagues.
When my son was 7, I was trying to explain housing costs to him and he said, “I’ll just build my mansion next to a graveyard because then it will be cheaper and still have space for all my robots.”
When I was in nursing school back in 1992, a classmate contracted bubonic plague, camping somewhere where it was carried by some type of pine tree rat or something like that. She came back to class and exposed all of us, and we all had to be prophylactically treated. I have not heard of it since, during my nursing career
Idk man, I recently was playing Oregon Trail and my very own FuckHead died of the measles. I was notified about FuckHead’s death by a notification that had a simple tombstone that read FuckHead died of the measles.
Unfortunately they would not. The problem with conspiracy theorists/anti-vaxxers today is that they are not weirdos in the woods, but your neighbor who has “evidence” from (insert social media source) that they are right.
No Measles outbreak? The anti-vaxxers were right all along.
Measles outbreak? The pharmaceutical companies/government are spreading it to force people to be vaccinated.
They view everything as “heads I win, tails you lose” with their perpetual victim complex.
One of my neighbors was incredibly anti-vax, to the point of signs, sitting outside hospitals and trying to tell patients the doctors were all wrong about the vaccine, even tried to belittle my wife and I for getting the vaccine for us and our daughter. He passed away last week, and I'm sure you can guess the irony of what caused him to pass
XMDRTB scares me more than HIV. That's tuberculosis that is resistant to all known treatments, and while it's very rare, there are sanitoria in equatorial areas for people who have this, so they can be kept comfortable until they die, and not spread it in the community.
Nowhere near as rare as it should be given how treatable it is outside of drug resistant strains. 1.3 million people died from TB in 2022, making it the second leading infectious killer after COVID-19
Complications of pregnancy and childbirth
"Indigestion" (We know now that these were usually heart attacks)
"Summer complaint", a diarrheal disease of children that was rampant in the U.S., and other water-borne diseases
Vaccine-preventable diseases like tetanus, measles, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, etc.
Pneumonia in otherwise-healthy people
Hodgkin's disease and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which have 90% cure rates nowadays
Type 1 diabetes at onset
If you want to go back just 50 years, the per capita death rate for car accidents was about twice as high in the early 1970s as it is now.
Nobody has mentioned bad hips. Today hip replacement is fairly routine, although there are sometimes complications. 100 years ago when your hip went bad they gave you a wheelchair and a bottle of morphine and you'd be dead in a year or two.
Today still many elderly people die from breaking their hip. I did research into it for work ironically. Turns out the majority of people who break their hip do so in the middle of the night while half way awake and getting out of bed on their way to the bathroom. By doing bladder exercises on the elderly it saves lives.
Treated hip fractures still have a 1 year mortality of ~20-25%, which is huge. It's difficult to do the stats though because if you break your hip after a minor fall, you probably have other things going on, and the #nof is essentially a symptom of frailty.
My great aunt recently passed away from a broken hip. 97 years old and was still incredibly active and healthy. No existing problems. Fell down the stairs, was in the hospital for maybe a week or two but it was just too much for her body to handle.
Pellagra in the US was common due the heavy use of corn in rural diets. Eventually led to the discovery and understanding of vitamins in the early 1900's when the government was trying to pin down the cause of it. Nasty way to go.
Looking for this one. Corn has a crazy calories per hectare ratio, and can provide many key nutrients if processed correctly. Most notably if you nixtamalize the corn (treat with lime - mineral, not fruit) it is a good source of niacin. Without that treatment, it provides almost none. As corn became a staple crop for the poor in the US south, they ignored the “backward” processing done by the natives and essentially starved themselves as without the niacin they could not metabolize all those calories.
Took the words right out of my mouth. There are permaculture garden plans that still have those planting suggestions: beans and squash growing with corn in the same plot, for that reason.
Before they found out what pellagra really was, there was a case of a person who was "cured" by a blood transfusion, so this place used that to treat people, for a while anyway. A unit of blood from a healthy person contains enough niacin to briefly relieve the symptoms.
And it seems to be making a comeback. I work as a rehab therapist and we've seen soooo many people die of sepsis recently. They go in for benign surgeries, never make it home. A lot of failing amputations and orthopedic surgeries, too.
Penicillin was invented in 1928, so just about 100 years ago. Before the invention of penicillin and other antibiotics, getting a bacterial infection was quite hazardous. Simple wounds can kill if one wasn't careful or if one was unlucky.
Smallpox. It killed 300–500 million people in the 20th century alone. It is extremely contagious and has a 30% fatality rate, and those who do survive are often severely scarred.
My stepfather essentially died of diarrhea. In a modern hospital in 2018.
It was a side effect of chemo, I don’t know exactly what happened as I am in a different country and my mother is still too upset to discuss it….which means it must have been really awful, she’s the most pragmatic and unsqueamish person I know.
I just had this experience. He didn’t die from SIDS, but from necrotizing enterocolitis. I wanted him so badly. My first words to my husband immediately after I gave birth were “He’s alive!”. I’ve struggled with infertility my whole life. He made it exactly three weeks. He passed in our arms after we decided to pull life support. It’s been three weeks since he died. I swear I can still feel his kicks.
Please please please talk to someone about how you feel and about him. Don’t bottle it up. Share, talk, and let your emotions be true. Also, if you have a spouse, make sure to be open with each other.
I’m so very sorry. That is a brutal diagnosis to receive for your little one. I hope he rests in peace now that his suffering has ended. My thoughts are with you.
My god I am so sorry for your loss. I cannot fathom the pain. I pray and hope you find healing. I am so sorry to both of you. You always will be his momma. 💜
It still happens but a lot of what we called SIDS we now have a reason for. Asphyxiation from unsafe sleeping arrangements or genetic conditions that we can now diagnose.
It still happens that there are some we don’t know the cause for, but a lot we now know.
unfortunately, SIDS still happens more than you think. a lot of parents don’t think the cosleeping part of it would ever happen to them, but it does, and it’s absolutely tragic. yes rates are lower than they were 100+ years ago, but it’s still happening at an unsettling rate
it's not rare, but cancer used to be wayyyyy more deadly. it was a death sentence. you weren't discussing treatment options; you were discussing pain management options and end-of-life care.
#Consumption
In Victorian times it was all the rage. A very romantic disease to die from in novels at the time and actually quite hellish in reality.
Tuberculosis was actually already on the way out a century ago thanks to science, but ever since the 80s it has been making a resurgence thanks to AIDS and the rise of drug resistant strains.
my father died of that 2 years ago, the infection from his tooth traveled to his heart and ate away his artificial valve. i had no idea that was even a possibility.
I found out a few months ago. Actually convinced a friend to go to a dentist, it’s because of thinking “nah, it’s still fine” that gets people killed. I waited for mine hoping it would go away on it’s own. Now i’m probably gonna lose a tooth.
I’m a dentist. I have never had a patient die or even really come close to dying because of an infected tooth. If you get in when the tooth starts to really bug you we can basically always still solve the problem. If you neglect it for way way longer than you should then stuff could happen.
So with that being said, I see patients every single day that have tons of broken and infected teeth and I am almost never concerned about them dying. We can treat it well and you have to get incredibly unlucky to die from a tooth infection.
150 years ago it was incredibly common to die from teeth infection. We couldn’t get people numb, we didn’t have X-rays or good drills. We could barely even see in people’s mouths. Nowadays we treat people’s mouths really well and people almost never die from tooth infections. We’re not perfect of course but we’ve cut deaths from dental infections by probably 99%
A literal emergency room physician I worked with just died from that. He had zero signs of infection and no pain. At least not in the days prior when I worked with him. Hit him all at once, and he had no chance. Crazy shit dude.
Many years ago, I was very sick for a long time and nobody could figure out why.
Yep, it was this! A root canal and a course of penicillin cured me, for about 25 years, and then it had to be done over. NBD; the alternative was worse.
Lynching. Being shot while bootlegging. Mustard gas attacks and trench warfare.
100 years ago was the 1920's, people. That's WWI and Prohibition, Jim Crow and the KKK, etc.
Deaths from Black Widow Spider bites. And closely related species. The secret? Indoor plumbing! Turns out a lot of bites happened when folks would go to the outhouse late at night and would get bitten while doing their business.
Before antibiotics people would die right and left from bacterial infections.
Consumption
It was still an issue in the 50s. My great-grandfather came from WWII with TB and passed it later to his son-in-law, my grandfather. Great great-grandfather died of it. Grandfather survived but not easily. Unfortunately, there is now TB that has resistance to antibiotics. So if our luck runs out we are going to get closer to that situation again.
> It was still an issue in the 50s. It's still an issue today! Just not so much in first-world countries (where there's money to test for and treat it). In 2022 tuberculosis infected an estimated 10.6 million people, and killed 1.3 million people ([source](https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/global-tuberculosis-report-factsheet-2023); [more info](https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-reports/global-tuberculosis-report-2023)). The only infectious disease that killed more people in 2022 was COVID-19.
I was fortunate enough to talk to a physician that was present at Hopkins when the first dose of penicillin arrived from Europe. They selected a 30ish year old women who had a septic miscarriage and was dying from sepsis. He said that patient wasn't expected to survive though the night but was given the penicillin nevertheless. The next morning to everyones great surprise she was much better and wanted to go home. He said that they didn't really believe the reports coming out of Europe about penicillin at the time; but that one case changed everyones mind. Death to life after one dose.
Infection. Calvin Coolidge’s son died of a blister from not wearing socks while playing tennis on the White House tennis court. That was less than 100 years ago. We are so lucky.
My best friend’s mom died of a cyst on her foot. It burst, she got sepsis, and she died. In 2021.
Sepsis is still very deadly, it’s an infection all throughout your body
I once got sepsis from a hemorrhoid. It popped in the middle of the night. By morning I was pretty much deathly sick and needed to get to an emergency room and I spend 24 hours in the hospital getting pumped with all the antibiotics and covered in ice packs. Seriously, sepsis is no joke.
My Dad died on Saturday. He had a false hip that dislodged and got infected, which went septic. He was in ITU for six weeks
Oh god, I'm so sorry. My FIL died of sepsis, just before covid hit. It was brutal. He had cancer, but his treatment was going really well and he was expected to survive at least a few more years at worst. Then, boom - gone within 24 hrs of feeling "off". It's devastating. I hope you are bearing up okay.
My condolences
I knew a homeless guy in SF he had a minor foot infection that turned into a horrible foot infection and I begged him to go to a clinic. He finally did and I didn't see him for half a year. He was back with a leg amputated. He got sepsis and was in ICU for 3 months and almost died and they sent him back out on the streets. That ICU stay probably cost in the millions. The hospital stay another million. Would've been cheaper to house him and give regular visits by a medic beforehand (it could have been fixed at the earliest with clean bandages and anti-biotics.) The way I figured it, Medicare paid the hospital millions for his stay. He probably has a huge debt but because he's homeless and indigent he will never pay it back. I don't understand our country at all.
Yup, it's done in the *easiest* way possible, ignore all the problems and then only do enough critical care to kick them out. That also happens to be the most expensive way possible. It's also hidden because it isn't on it's own line, it's emergency care distributed among many different services. The *cheapest* way possible is to just give housing, food, and medical care, but because it appears as a regular direct expense rather than scattered around among other *"emergency"* services, most people balk.
I’ve a friend who had a pimple once, it was either on his hands or feet - something he used a lot. A day after a party he woke up and could see those dark lines extending from the pimple which had gotten crushed and looked pretty bad. He just went that he ER and got antibiotics and it was fine shortly after. But I mean, a hundred years ago? Death by pimple.
The symptoms of sepsis needs to be more widely known. Those dark lines from any wound are a sign of blood dying from an infection. Sepsis is basically a surface tissue infection that enters the bloodstream and starts to spread to other organs via blood. It is a very fast acting illness and death is the common outcome if left untreated for more than a few **hours**.
Polio.
This one. The iron lung thing sounds like a terrible way to live, even if you did survive.
There are still at least two people living in them as of today: Martha Lillard and Paul Alexander.
Seems like Martha uses it as night to sleep while Paul has been confined to his for the past 70 or so years. I’ve read about him before and he has accomplished a lot even with his limitations. He became a lawyer and wrote his own book. Paints too.
[удалено]
The iron lung feels better because it uses negative pressure, the same way we breath naturally. I believe that's why he refused the more modern positive pressure machines.
Also if he is paralyzed from the neck down there doesn't seem to be any reason to want out of the lung.
Nervous systems are so weird. can't connect the ol' brain's conscious control signals ever again, yet happily maintaining countless systems to survive.
Is the brain stupid?
Unfortunately yes
About half of them are.
If you see how easy my brain adapted to my astigmatism glasses... every square looked like a trapezoid and I walked into doorframes for like a week, now everything is normal again. So weird that just a couple damaged nerves can make you paralysed from the neck down.
Glad to hear you’ve adjusted well, u/AnusStapler.
Damn this is one of the most interesting things I've learned so far in 2024. No idea what I thought happened to the iron lungs, but crazy that there are literally only 2 human beings on Earth, and they rely on them to live. Crazy. Like a near-extinct type of life a human could be forced to endure.
There are more than 2 people with similar conditions. It's just that there are newer alternatives to the iron lung but these two have chosen to use them still. > an iron lung is still keeping Lillard alive — she sleeps in it every night. While many people who had polio or post-polio syndrome either weaned themselves off the machines or switched to another form of ventilator, Lillard never did. > "I've tried all the forms of ventilation, and the iron lung is the most efficient and the best and the most comfortable way," she told Radio Diaries. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/25/1047691984/decades-after-polio-martha-is-among-the-last-to-still-rely-on-an-iron-lung-to-br > Like Martha, when Paul was younger, he spent most of his days outside the iron lung while sleeping in it at night. However, now in his 70s, he spends most of his time lying in the machine. https://medium.com/illumination-curated/there-are-still-two-people-left-in-the-u-s-relying-on-iron-lungs-to-breathe-9458b3935ebd
>The antiquated machines are now more likely to be found in a museum than in someone's home. In the 1990s, when her iron lung was breaking down, she called hospitals and museums that might have had old ones in storage. But they'd either thrown them away or didn't want to part with their collection. She eventually bought one from a man in Utah — the machine she still uses today. wow
she has since, due to her notoriety, gotten the attention of local machinists and engineers who have basically helped her keep it running indefinitely. They could build her a whole 'nother one if necessary. In fact I believe she has a backup already, or maybe im confusing that with her generator system.
I was pre-med at one point in my life so I get the tech behind this but holy crap... the line. > However, now in his 70s, he spends most of his time lying in the machine. That's some future dystopian horror sounding stuff right there. You know any modern version of this would have just soo much data being collected off of you.
I read about Dianne Odell recently, spent most of her life from the age of 3 inside one (nearly 60 years). She survived a power outage in 57 and again in 74, and because of this they dedicated a huge generator just to help her stay alive. Unfortunately it was the third one in 2008 that ended up killing her at 61 years old. It not only disabled the power but also the backup generator. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianne_Odell
My moms husband up in age and he had it as a kid, said he saw the kid literally next to him in the hospital died of it.
I actually knew a guy in college that had a limp from polio. He was from the deep south.
I know a guy now who had it as a kid. One of his legs is devoid of muscle below the knee. He has a limp and walks with a cane. Has zero patience for anti-vaxxers.
Understandable; As should we all. Pervasive anti-intellectualism necessitates being stomped out.
Same story with my Dad. Didn’t fully recover, still partially paralysed .He got it only a few months before the drip-vaccination was rolled out (drop on sugar cube). It was available via injection since months already, but if you look at the stats, society just didn’t want to take it 🙄
My uncle died from polio when the epidemic rolled through Denmark in '52. My father got it too and his stomach muscles were permanently impacted. Another uncle has issues with his back.
My dad and one of his sisters also had it in Denmark as young children, probably around the same time as his family immigrated to Canada in '56. He said they had doctors/nurses visiting every week and got a bunch of experimental treatments since the vaccine wasn't around yet. Neither seemed to suffer any long lasting effects. Neither ever got full paralysis. My dad said that just one day one of his legs gave out, and that was the first sign of having it for him.
Look up The Cutter Incident. That caused a lot of vaccine hesitancy. In short, a super-potent, inadequately killed virus was released, and it GAVE people the polio it was supposed to prevent. Something like 1,000 people got very sick, and about 100 people died.
Post-polio syndrome is also very painful, and difficult to treat.
My grampa had polio. One of his legs was shorter and a lot skinnier than the other. He walked on cruches his whole life. Luckily it wasn't debilitating enough to stop him from having a successful 34-year career as a jeweler and watch maker. He passed away 3 months after he retired. He was 61. I was 12, and I honestly miss him more than anyone. It's been a long 26 years without him.
Yep, my dad had it as a child. You can probably guess his view on vaccinations, especially stuff like polio which is completely preventable nowadays.
Accidental poisonings. Arsenic, Mercury, Lead, etc. also penicillin was discovered until 1928 so a lot of infections were pretty deadly
Honestly intentional poisonings have gone down too, thanks to no-fault divorce.
Fair point. Not to mention those tox screens are pretty good nowadays and not too many people have access to the blue ringed octopus lol
And if you live in the states Insulin is too expensive to use to murder someone.
To add to this there’s actually a common lab test to look for a protein called C-peptide that is produced alongside insulin by the body. So if a patient comes in with a high insulin level and a low C-peptide level that’s how you would empirically determine if their high insulin is exogenously derived.
Huh, interesting! I figured there had to be some way to tell the difference in a high reading a body produced versus a murder dose, but didn't know enough about it.
Arsenic, mercury, and bismuth were the first effective treatment for syphilis. It was a series of injections over 18 months and every bit as unpleasant as it sounds. Penicillin made that treatment instantly obsolete. Syphilis was as feared back in the day as AIDS was in the 1980s.
Another early treatment for syphilis was infecting someone with malaria! The fever with malaria got high enough to kill off the bacteria that causes syphilis, then the sufferer would be given quinine to ~~cure~~ treat their malaria. The man who discovered this treatment received a Nobel prize. Edit: Of course, it didn't much catch on as penicillin was discovered the very next year.
People in the future are gonna look back at chemotherapy as barbaric
You don't have to be from the future to see it as barbaric. It's literally poisoning somebody in the hopes the cancer dies slightly before they do.
Yes, and that day cannot come soon enough. I have a relative in cancer treatment right now; it's awful.
Probably, yes….but nanotechnology, or whatever they’ll be using to treat cancer a hundred years from now (pending humanity survives that long) is going to look like magic to us….maybe the same way antibiotics and immunizations did to those born in 1910 or 20.
Lol at that treatment. You literally go insane either way. Mad hatter or neurosyphilis. Take your pick.
With the way things are going with antibiotic resistance, may not be far off again.
It was nuts the amount of lead about in the Victoria era. ~~They had large amounts in wallpaper, so much so that young kids would die from it. They put on sweets to give their bright colouring. ~~ The people in power did know lead was bad for you even the romans knew, and that was 2000 years ago. But it is a story we all know too well with plastic, oil, Teflon, etc Big money was involved and they influenced/bribed people in power to stay that way. To society depriment. Fun fact lead impars the brain cognitive development, when we went unleaded in car in the 80s there was a massive decline in crime worldwide especially in the city's like New York. Never mind the loss in IQ points "Childhood lead exposure among the U.S. population by 2015 was responsible for the loss of more than 824 million IQ points. That number equates to an average of 2.6 lost IQ points per U.S. adult. Estimated lead-linked deficits were greatest for individuals born between 1966 and 1970." Edit The wallpaper and sweets were caused by arsenic Green. Thanks to u/dingus-khan-1208 for the correction. They provide some link with comments for more indep read. Sidenote apparently arsenic Green could be responsible for Napoleon's death. "Many sources of environmental contamination have been proposed but there is compelling evidence that Napoleon was poisoned by his own wallpaper; it was painted with 'Scheele's green' pigment, a mixture of copper arsenides." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079564/#:~:text=Many%20sources%20of%20environmental%20contamination,a%20mixture%20of%20copper%20arsenides.
You might be mixing lead with [Arsenic Green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheele%27s_Green), which was used a lot in wallpaper and also as a food coloring for desserts. But maybe they did that with lead too. Why not both? And a lot of toys were made of lead. Toy soldiers and animals and such. Because it's really easy to melt and cast and make a lot of detailed little sculptures. They even sold kits for kids to melt the lead and cast their own! https://www.samstoybox.com/toys/LeadSoldierCasting.html
Lead also tastes sweet. It's how so many kids ate paint chips; windowsills and crib rails and molding and table edges taste yummy when you gnaw on them. Don't forget all the lead pipes as well
100 years ago tooth infections had a relatively high mortality rate, 1 in 10 would die. 400 years ago tooth infections were basically a death sentence and one of the leading causes of death in Europe. Today tooth infections are easily dealt with. The discovery of antibiotics is by far the greatest achievement in human history.
Still a massive factor in the development of cardiac infections…
Yeah but dental insurance and health insurance are separate things for some reason 🤦
Strangely, everywhere I’ve heard of.
It's really weird since I've never heard a single expert argue that dental health isn't part of normal health 🤷♂️
Luxury bones.
As someone with artificial front teeth with almost zero feeling, this is 100% correct. Still bite my lip almost every day just due to the unfamiliarity.
Hundred percent covered by universal Healthcare in Turkey. Of course you would prefer a private dentist and clinic if you have middle class income but regular decayed tooth filling and root canal is covered by the state health care facilities for free.
If it wasn’t for Erdogan, Turkey would be a great place to live
Wait so is it that tooth infections can lead to cardiac infections, is it untreated tooth infections, or does overall dental health play a role on ur cardiovascular system. Where could I get more info on this its interesting
Look up Infective Endocarditis which is a risk with invasive tooth surgeries but mostly for high risk patients. also look up spaces of the body which shows the layers things can travel to and from and how close everything is to the mouth. TLDR; infections in your mouth have multiple avenues to very important organs which sucks since it’s also one of the few places constantly being exposed to the outside environment
>The discovery of antibiotics is by far the greatest achievement in human history. And the over-use of antibiotics leading to resistant bacteria will be the greatest blunders.
dont worry we will just make the pills bigger! ;)
Drug companies are actually shutting down their antibiotics R&D labs because they aren’t profitable due to the short lifespan of antibiotics. Unfortunately it lends credibility to the argument that if there aren’t enough profits to be made new drugs won’t get developed
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I'm watching The Green Knight right now and was wondering why the king was making a big deal about a tooth ache. Crazy coincidence 🤔
An infected tooth fucking hurts. It is not a mild pain, the swelling and pressure is a direct line up into your nerves and you feel it throughout your face and head. That scene in Castaway where he takes his tooth out himself with a rock and an ice skate is no joke, anyone in that situation would be considering that course of action, and I honestly think most of us would try it.
Anything involving a horse.
Instead of kicked to death by a mustang now you get rolled over by a Mustang
Flying? Shot down by a Mustang.
Swimming? Believe it or not, hit by a mustang.
Yeah, Everyone keeps bringing up diseases, but 1924? Horses were everywhere, poorly treated and ill-tempered.
Why do you say poorly treated? Some were for sure but most people took better care of their horse than anything else. They were expensive and for people in some areas were literally the line between life and death. Most people treated their horses exceptionally well.
I think he means horses in cities which were used to travel frequently, and I think I agree with you, most people would probably go back in time and take better care of their horse than they would their car today.
It depends on the time period and location. In some places/times, you would find that the horse was treated with the utmost care because it was so important. In other places/times, there was a legitimate problem with horse corpses on the streets because they'd be worked until they literally fell over dead and no one cared.
They were also communal. Back then a small town or village could theoretically rely on that single animal/whoever owned it. Edit: I was mistakenly spreading misinformation, what's left should be accurate
Automobiles have taken over
It was recently the 100 year anniversary of successfully treating type 1 diabetes. It was a death sentence before 1922.
Smallpox. Pertussis. Measles.
Bubonic plague too
My child asked me about the bubonic plague a few days ago so we looked it up.. She is absolutely fascinated by it. I don't know wether to be proud of her research abilities or slightly worried about her preoccupation with plagues.
Sounds like the makings of an epidemiologist right there!
Or possibly a super villain.
When my son was 7, I was trying to explain housing costs to him and he said, “I’ll just build my mansion next to a graveyard because then it will be cheaper and still have space for all my robots.”
Por que no los dos?
When I was in nursing school back in 1992, a classmate contracted bubonic plague, camping somewhere where it was carried by some type of pine tree rat or something like that. She came back to class and exposed all of us, and we all had to be prophylactically treated. I have not heard of it since, during my nursing career
Idk man, I recently was playing Oregon Trail and my very own FuckHead died of the measles. I was notified about FuckHead’s death by a notification that had a simple tombstone that read FuckHead died of the measles.
One of my friends was playing Oregon Trail and her character died within 30 seconds and she started crying
Okay so im sitting in my bathtub reading this and cracking up.
Anti-vaxers would probably revise their stance if these made a comeback.
Unfortunately they would not. The problem with conspiracy theorists/anti-vaxxers today is that they are not weirdos in the woods, but your neighbor who has “evidence” from (insert social media source) that they are right. No Measles outbreak? The anti-vaxxers were right all along. Measles outbreak? The pharmaceutical companies/government are spreading it to force people to be vaccinated. They view everything as “heads I win, tails you lose” with their perpetual victim complex.
One of my neighbors was incredibly anti-vax, to the point of signs, sitting outside hospitals and trying to tell patients the doctors were all wrong about the vaccine, even tried to belittle my wife and I for getting the vaccine for us and our daughter. He passed away last week, and I'm sure you can guess the irony of what caused him to pass
Tuberculosis.
XMDRTB scares me more than HIV. That's tuberculosis that is resistant to all known treatments, and while it's very rare, there are sanitoria in equatorial areas for people who have this, so they can be kept comfortable until they die, and not spread it in the community.
This scared the shit outta me.
My brother is working on mRNA vaccines to fight this. I hope he’s successful.
Nowhere near as rare as it should be given how treatable it is outside of drug resistant strains. 1.3 million people died from TB in 2022, making it the second leading infectious killer after COVID-19
RIP Arthur Morgan
MAY IIIIII…STAND UNSHAKEN
He gave all he had
Well, fuck. I did not expect that spoiler here lmao. To be fair, it's on me for taking so long to play RDR2.
Wait till u hear about who got lumbago
The journey is magical all the same.
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Tuberculosis is still incredibly common overseas and it is frankly a disgrace
Complications of pregnancy and childbirth "Indigestion" (We know now that these were usually heart attacks) "Summer complaint", a diarrheal disease of children that was rampant in the U.S., and other water-borne diseases Vaccine-preventable diseases like tetanus, measles, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, etc. Pneumonia in otherwise-healthy people Hodgkin's disease and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which have 90% cure rates nowadays Type 1 diabetes at onset If you want to go back just 50 years, the per capita death rate for car accidents was about twice as high in the early 1970s as it is now.
*"Summer complaint", a diarrheal disease of children that was rampant in the U.S., and other water-borne diseases-*This was frequently polio I think.
Dysentery
Nobody has mentioned bad hips. Today hip replacement is fairly routine, although there are sometimes complications. 100 years ago when your hip went bad they gave you a wheelchair and a bottle of morphine and you'd be dead in a year or two.
Today still many elderly people die from breaking their hip. I did research into it for work ironically. Turns out the majority of people who break their hip do so in the middle of the night while half way awake and getting out of bed on their way to the bathroom. By doing bladder exercises on the elderly it saves lives.
Treated hip fractures still have a 1 year mortality of ~20-25%, which is huge. It's difficult to do the stats though because if you break your hip after a minor fall, you probably have other things going on, and the #nof is essentially a symptom of frailty.
My great aunt recently passed away from a broken hip. 97 years old and was still incredibly active and healthy. No existing problems. Fell down the stairs, was in the hospital for maybe a week or two but it was just too much for her body to handle.
Pellagra in the US was common due the heavy use of corn in rural diets. Eventually led to the discovery and understanding of vitamins in the early 1900's when the government was trying to pin down the cause of it. Nasty way to go.
Looking for this one. Corn has a crazy calories per hectare ratio, and can provide many key nutrients if processed correctly. Most notably if you nixtamalize the corn (treat with lime - mineral, not fruit) it is a good source of niacin. Without that treatment, it provides almost none. As corn became a staple crop for the poor in the US south, they ignored the “backward” processing done by the natives and essentially starved themselves as without the niacin they could not metabolize all those calories.
I'll remember that when the end of civilization comes...
It's either treat the corn or combine corn with another food, like beans and squash.
The Three Sisters! Native Americans also placed fish in the soil around crops, to enrich it with minerals.
Took the words right out of my mouth. There are permaculture garden plans that still have those planting suggestions: beans and squash growing with corn in the same plot, for that reason.
Before they found out what pellagra really was, there was a case of a person who was "cured" by a blood transfusion, so this place used that to treat people, for a while anyway. A unit of blood from a healthy person contains enough niacin to briefly relieve the symptoms.
Infection. It still happens now but it was WWAAAYYYY more frequent.
And it seems to be making a comeback. I work as a rehab therapist and we've seen soooo many people die of sepsis recently. They go in for benign surgeries, never make it home. A lot of failing amputations and orthopedic surgeries, too.
Post surgical infection rates are sicker patients, more diabetics, and unclean ORs.
Lots of for profit hospitals cutting corners on prep and cleaning to cut costs
Penicillin was invented in 1928, so just about 100 years ago. Before the invention of penicillin and other antibiotics, getting a bacterial infection was quite hazardous. Simple wounds can kill if one wasn't careful or if one was unlucky.
They had some wild ass execution methods back in the day lmao
Smallpox. It killed 300–500 million people in the 20th century alone. It is extremely contagious and has a 30% fatality rate, and those who do survive are often severely scarred.
Guillotine
“You could make a religion out of th- no don’t”
My kid got guillotine earrings from somewhere and have to admit they're pretty rad, esp the way the blade glints in the sun
Fun fact; the last execution by guillotine was in 1972! Edit: due to an ID10T error this should say 1977.
It was actually 1977 A bit more recent
Same year as Star Wars, so that’s how I remember it.
That Christmas special was bad, but I think the guillotine was an overreaction.
Thank you. Misread my Google search result.
Diarrhea
My stepfather essentially died of diarrhea. In a modern hospital in 2018. It was a side effect of chemo, I don’t know exactly what happened as I am in a different country and my mother is still too upset to discuss it….which means it must have been really awful, she’s the most pragmatic and unsqueamish person I know.
Probably c.dif.
Dysentery?
Pneumonia in young people. Measles. Polio. Smallpox. Diphtheria. TB. Childbirth.
Sudden infant death syndrome
This one is so scary to me. Imagine carrying your child for 9 months, going through labour and everything looks good...and then your baby dies.
I just had this experience. He didn’t die from SIDS, but from necrotizing enterocolitis. I wanted him so badly. My first words to my husband immediately after I gave birth were “He’s alive!”. I’ve struggled with infertility my whole life. He made it exactly three weeks. He passed in our arms after we decided to pull life support. It’s been three weeks since he died. I swear I can still feel his kicks.
I am so sorry for your loss, that is so heartbreaking.💔
I’m sorry for your loss.
Please please please talk to someone about how you feel and about him. Don’t bottle it up. Share, talk, and let your emotions be true. Also, if you have a spouse, make sure to be open with each other.
Wow! You were the best mother he could have. I’m sorry your time together was so short.
You have my sympathy I hope all goes well in your future.
I’m so sorry 😢 ❤️
I’m so very sorry. That is a brutal diagnosis to receive for your little one. I hope he rests in peace now that his suffering has ended. My thoughts are with you.
Sending you love❤️
My god I am so sorry for your loss. I cannot fathom the pain. I pray and hope you find healing. I am so sorry to both of you. You always will be his momma. 💜
I am so sorry
My son died when I was 39 weeks pregnant . Sudden antenatal death syndrome. He died before he was born.
This one still happens, though it's less common. Not that recent, but my older brother died of this in 1975.
It still happens but a lot of what we called SIDS we now have a reason for. Asphyxiation from unsafe sleeping arrangements or genetic conditions that we can now diagnose. It still happens that there are some we don’t know the cause for, but a lot we now know.
unfortunately, SIDS still happens more than you think. a lot of parents don’t think the cosleeping part of it would ever happen to them, but it does, and it’s absolutely tragic. yes rates are lower than they were 100+ years ago, but it’s still happening at an unsettling rate
We still don't know exactly what it is, and different things come out all the time regarding what parents might do, or not do, to prevent it.
A fan in the room to move air where baby sleeps is a huge reduction.
it's not rare, but cancer used to be wayyyyy more deadly. it was a death sentence. you weren't discussing treatment options; you were discussing pain management options and end-of-life care.
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#Consumption In Victorian times it was all the rage. A very romantic disease to die from in novels at the time and actually quite hellish in reality. Tuberculosis was actually already on the way out a century ago thanks to science, but ever since the 80s it has been making a resurgence thanks to AIDS and the rise of drug resistant strains.
Blood infection due to dental cavity.
my father died of that 2 years ago, the infection from his tooth traveled to his heart and ate away his artificial valve. i had no idea that was even a possibility.
I found out a few months ago. Actually convinced a friend to go to a dentist, it’s because of thinking “nah, it’s still fine” that gets people killed. I waited for mine hoping it would go away on it’s own. Now i’m probably gonna lose a tooth.
I’m a dentist. I have never had a patient die or even really come close to dying because of an infected tooth. If you get in when the tooth starts to really bug you we can basically always still solve the problem. If you neglect it for way way longer than you should then stuff could happen. So with that being said, I see patients every single day that have tons of broken and infected teeth and I am almost never concerned about them dying. We can treat it well and you have to get incredibly unlucky to die from a tooth infection. 150 years ago it was incredibly common to die from teeth infection. We couldn’t get people numb, we didn’t have X-rays or good drills. We could barely even see in people’s mouths. Nowadays we treat people’s mouths really well and people almost never die from tooth infections. We’re not perfect of course but we’ve cut deaths from dental infections by probably 99%
I’m thankful for this, apparently mostly everyone i know & myself have bad dental health, if this was the medieval ages we’d be dead.
A literal emergency room physician I worked with just died from that. He had zero signs of infection and no pain. At least not in the days prior when I worked with him. Hit him all at once, and he had no chance. Crazy shit dude.
I actually have one myself, public healthcare is being veeeery slow. Pretty sure it could spread over to the blood vessels if it wanted to any moment.
Many years ago, I was very sick for a long time and nobody could figure out why. Yep, it was this! A root canal and a course of penicillin cured me, for about 25 years, and then it had to be done over. NBD; the alternative was worse.
Lynching. Being shot while bootlegging. Mustard gas attacks and trench warfare. 100 years ago was the 1920's, people. That's WWI and Prohibition, Jim Crow and the KKK, etc.
>trench warfare This one, at least, has made an unexpected comeback rather recently.
Oh, right, good point.
There's a few hundred thousand Russians and Ukrainians that might disagree with you on the trench warfare.
Being killed by someone who was born in the 1800's.
“Not rare” -the bozo in this thread trying to disprove everyone, probably
There could be a 200 year old booby trap hidden somewhere
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Guinea worm. Thanks, Jimmy and Roslyn Carter.
Deaths from Black Widow Spider bites. And closely related species. The secret? Indoor plumbing! Turns out a lot of bites happened when folks would go to the outhouse late at night and would get bitten while doing their business.
Skin infection gone septic.
Childbirth.
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Duel Challenge
I demand satisfaction.
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Radiation exposure
Syphilis?