MintyWhale99

It interestingly starts turning up in literature in the period covering five major cholera outbreaks in the UK and US (this was obviously an English language Ngram search).

And peaks several times at epidemic peak points (1830s, 1850, 1880s), including its first peak in 1831/2, which corresponds with the first cholera epidemic in the UK. 

It also corresponds with the year William Brooke O’Shaughnessy discovered that a lot of people who were dying of cholera were severely lacking water and salts in their blood and urine. Dehydration was found to be a major cause of death in cholera patients. “Toast water” was suggested in the Lancet medical journal in 1832 as an initial treatment for cholera patients. 

Most of the recipes in household medicine guides I found suggest sweetening or flavouring the toast water with something if the patient could keep it down in order to cover the terrible taste.

they didn’t know what <em>sort</em> of fluids they should be trying to push. The obvious answer for “what can be healthily introduced directly into the bloodstream?” is “more blood,” but

they didn’t know about blood types yet, so early experiments with blood transfusions sometimes worked a treat and sometimes…didn’t. Really didn’t. Which didn’t keep them from trying additional fluids! But,

they also didn’t have germ theory, which meant they didn’t know needles needed to not just be visibly clean but actually sterile, or how to get them that way. So jamming a needle directly into a sick person’s vein was often just a recipe for infection. 

Dehydration kills you fast. Levels of vomiting and diarrhea that could easily have been fatal 200 years ago–or even 100; replacing nutrition, not just water, intravenously didn’t really get worked out until the 1960s–no longer seem dangerous to us, in a world where you can buy electrolyte drinks at any corner store and IV fluids can be administered in any medical facility including an ambulance. But in the 1830s they were no joke, and any recipe that would get fluids into a sick person was worth trying.

(Additionally, between flu shots and better food safety, people today don’t have a lot of experience with being literally too sick to keep water down, but that is a thing that happens. When I was 10 my state was hit with an influenza epidemic–just that year’s flu, but it was a bad one–that had half the school out sick for weeks at a time. Flu shots existed, but they weren’t yet being offered to everyone every year; they were just for the medically fragile. (This was in the mid-eighties; yes, I’m that old.)

I was out for five weeks–mostly recovering from week one. In which I lost 15% of my body weight because the <em>only</em> fluid I could keep down was Welch’s Sparkling Strawberry Soda. It took us days of experimentation with every sugary drink in the store to find something I could keep in my stomach. (Why wasn’t I on IV fluids after day 3? Because I still wasn’t sick enough to get a hospital bed anywhere in three counties, because everyone else was sick at the same time.)

Vaccine.

Has no cure.

a) Vaccines aren’t cures, which are therapeutic, they’re vaccines, which are prophylactic. That’s why we don’t call them cures.

b) You can actually vaccinate against a bacterial infection, a vaccine is just something which trains your immune system. In fact, a new vaccine against pneumococcal bacteria was just approved for use earlier this year, and we’ve had vaccines against bacterial diseases like anthrax and tuberculosis for years now. The reason we talk so much about vaccines against viral diseases is that, unlike bacterial diseases, it’s a lot more difficult to treat a virus once you’ve caught it.

Seriously this whole time highschoolers have had recess somewhere I’m