Vampires, Microbes, and the Medicine of Paranoia
by Steven Goldsmith MD
The development of the germ theory of disease by Louis Pasteur (1822–95) and Robert Koch (1843–1910) in the late nineteenth century shunted Medicine onto a dead-end path from which it has never escaped. Instead of focusing its subsequent efforts on strengthening whole human beings, it became increasingly preoccupied with unseen invaders that infiltrate and harm us. With their mobility, invisibility, invasiveness, and ubiquity, microbes evoked fear and demonization more readily than, say, an inflamed appendix or balky gall bladder—stationary and visible structures that we recognize as parts of ourselves, unlike the microscopic aliens.
In 1882 Koch stunned the public and many of his colleagues by announcing that Mycobacterium tuberculosis spread TB, which killed one out of every seven humans and at least one-third of the middle-aged. In so doing, Koch transformed the genesis of this disease in our collective psyche from a problem of miasmal vapors, malnutrition, and romantic temperament to one of attack and infestation by tiny beings. Such news conjured a more scientific and rational yet frightening view of the world. For we were now surrounded by unseen corrupters of our flesh. They could be anywhere.
It cannot be coincidence that Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula saw the light of day fifteen years later. In this tale, the eponymous count drains the life force from his victims, who, after succumbing and joining him in the world of the Undead, prey upon their own victims, who in turn victimize others, thus enlarging the circle of pestilence and decrepitude. There is little overt violence, no slashers or chainsaw killers. The deaths accrue instead through stealth, languor, and decay, with the vampires lurking in crypts or within alter egos of bats and wolves, their victims pale but sporting unnaturally rosy cheeks—common stigmata, by the way, of real-life tuberculosis. In short, Dracula concerns a deadly contagion spread by malevolent organisms. More specifically, it is a post-Kochian, febrile vision of TB, as perceived through lenses not of microscopes but of our deepest fears.
The association between TB and vampires was not only fictional. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of well-documented vampire hysterias erupted in towns throughout New England. Townspeople would exhume, mutilate, and dismember the corpses of neighbors and relatives who had died of a wasting illness, believing the deceased were rising from their graves to feast upon the living, causing the latter to waste away from illness in the same manner. Almost all such hysterias occurred during severe outbreaks of tuberculosis.
Since 1897 a plethora of other novels and horror films have, like Dracula, addressed our fears of evil invaders, especially those who disseminate their self-propagating miasmas among us. Consider werewolves, whose bites generate new members of their mad species. Or those staples of 1950s American paranoia, science fiction films like Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, featuring beings that invade and extinguish the personalities of their victims, who in turn spread this affliction to others. Or our contemporary incarnation of the evil alien, the serial killer, that random dispatcher of strangers, whose deaths, because of their unpredictability, resemble fatalities from infectious disease far more than did those found in earlier whodunits.
Consider our modern weapons of antibacterial soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, and hand sanitizers; our profligate use of antimicrobial drugs. Has the fear of contagion so infected our zeitgeist as to shape such a large body of our fictional creations? Or do these fictions reflect ancestral fears that have haunted humanity since time out of mind—fears of threats to the integrity of our bodies and personal identities—and have we merely projected these fears onto microbes? Both claims may have merit.
Unfortunately, as noted, these fears have so warped my profession’s and the public’s concepts of health and disease that we have lost the plot. The path to true health is not principally through obliterating bad actors like microbes, cancer cells, and abnormal molecules that populate bodily fluids, but in fortifying the vitality and resistance of whole human beings.
Be well.
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There is something that scares me even more than the threat of nuclear war. The biggest threat to the well-being of Americans is the total lack of any rational effective response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Something like 98% of the people who died from the virus had from one to ten preexisting conditions. A million or more Americans died from the virus but not because it was particularly virulent. Most of them suffered and died because they had become unhealthy and susceptible. If the virus had hit the United States back in the 1960s when the levels of obesity, type-2 diabetes and high blood pressure were far lower than today, Covid would have been no more dangerous than getting a cold. I was 75 when I caught Covid, and it felt like a mild cold.
Given everything we learned about the pandemic, the most rational response by the American people and their government would have been a nation-wide call to arms and the mobilization of a War on Obesity. The goal should have been to accomplish even more than the campaign against smoking that has done so much good and demonstrates this sort of thing is possible.
The trillions of dollars that were wasted during the criminally stupid lockdowns should have been spent on efforts to get people to eat better and be more active. The lockdowns made things worse by terrifying people to the point they were afraid to leave their homes. I had a neighbor who I helped get in shape before the pandemic. In early 2020 he weighed 217 lbs. and was in good health. Four years later after the Covid insanity, he was 267. How many millions of Americans had the same thing happen to them.
My greatest hope right now is that Trump will be reelected and the first thing he will do is appoint Robert Kennedy to some position where he can utterly destroy big pharma and totally reform America's healthcare system.
As Steven's article so brilliantly explains, our nation needs a whole new approach to well-being.
I have to say your writing style puts things into perspective from an angle that makes me really think about things in a way I never have before.
I believe in this article you have done that in a way that brings home your points perfectly. When I really think about it, your points are logical and make sense.
Well done !!!
Side note:
I remember watching, Invasion of the Body Snatchers when it came out and it scared me in a way that I wondered if it could really be true. In my mind that kind of confirms what you were writing about.