The greatest invention of the Industrial Age isn’t the iPhone or lithium-ion batteries or even the internal combustion engine — it’s public health. Unfortunately for our “see it to believe it” culture, public health works best when it’s practically invisible, just humming along in the background. Thus, there are few things Westerners take for granted more than reduced child mortality, reduced death in child birth and the eradication of history’s most brutal diseases like polio and smallpox.
Thankfully, very few of us know what it’s like to grow up with half our siblings dying from relatively minor infections or experiencing life-long disability from surviving an epidemic. Those days are behind us — or so some of us thought.
