The Brontës, TB and you've never had it so good

Very occasionally, I remove the cardboard from the broken windows and lying on my bed of long-haired stray cats and covered with sheets of the 'Daily Telegraph' and 'the Guardian', I gaze up in awe and wonder at the night sky, the tiny jewels twinkling through the haze of diesel fumes and charcoal smoke, and I remind myself of how lucky I am!

I was reminded of this by the Brontë sisters who were born in the first half of the nineteenth century. I must confess to not having an awful lot of time for the literary endeavours of that trio of Brontës or for that matter Austen or Gaskill, although I suspect that it has less to do with their feminine nature and more to do with a dislike of nineteenth century English prose in general, although there are a few exceptions; I accept that it is good, I just do not read them for pleasure. What struck me about the Brontës was how short their lives had been, with the notable exception of Papa Brontë, who lived to be eighty-four.

Mama Brontë, no doubt worn out with six children died at thirty-eight; Maria died at the age of eleven; Elizabeth at age ten; Charlotte managed to make it all the way to thirty-eight, although her unborn child died with her; Patrick only managed to get to thirty-one, although the alcohol and laudanum addictions may well have had something to do with that; Emily only just managed to beat her younger sister Anne by a single year, thirty to twenty-nine. Out of eight members of a family, all but one did not manage to get to forty. It is likely that five of the children, Maria, Elizabeth, Patrick, Emily and Anne, died of tuberculosis and Charlotte of complications with her pregnancy or possibly typhus.

It is often difficult to conceive of how much we owe to the likes of Jenner, Lister, Calmette and Guérin, Banting and Best, Florey and Chain, Jonas Salk, Christian Barnard* and all those unnamed chemists and doctors who have given us such an abundance of ways in which we might combat the infections and diseases to which the human body is prey. In little more than fifty years, so much of what killed our forefathers no longer kills us. Of course, it is not only drugs or surgical procedures which now save lives which would have been unheard of in my great-grandfather's time. Pasteur's pioneering work on microbacteria led to theories that it was such bacteria which caused infection and disease and which slowly raised the importance of public health and hygene during the twentieth century in western industrialised nations and which now forms a major part of foreign aid to developing countries. It is difficult to imagine that something which we take so much for granted that we do not give it a second thought, fresh, disease-free, running water, is actually a luxury in many parts of the world.

For much of humankind's history, and isolated historical examples notwithstanding**, life has been, to quote Hobbes, 'nasty, brutish and short'. Even in these so-called enlightened and technologically advanced times there are still large tracts of the globe in which Hobbes still applies and yet, we in the west, continue to demand more with each successive generation. It is, of course, not the fault of the generations that came after my generation to expect more of life; my expectations were necessarily less than theirs now because the wealth was not available to purchase all that you might desire and, perhaps more importantly, what is available now was not available then. We are rapidly becoming a society in which your every desire should be satisfied and you should, at the very least, expect to live forever!

Prior to the twentieth century, imagined views of a society in the future were largely Untopian in nature and had occupied moral and political philosophers since Plato; a dystopian*** view of a future society, except in a few isolated cases, 'Rasselas' by Samuel Johnson springs to mind, is almost unknown until after 1918. This is scarcely suprising, life for many in industrialised countries was still 'nasty, brutish and short' at the turn of the twentieth century and no-one had to imagine a less than perfect world; if it had been a dog it would have bitten most of the population. With the exception of 'Brave New World', most dystopian views of a future world mostly postdate the second world war. It is possible to have a pessimistic view of the future of the world when all is sunshine and roses; to to so when the world is actually like that is much more difficult!

In the end, so much depends on the continuing creativity and ingenuity of humankind, a ready supply of raw materials and an avoidance of conflict over resources. Personally, I do not hold out a lot of hope that any of these things will actually materialise in the future. I think that the best we, in the west can hope for, is that it is not too cold in the Chinese concentration camps and that we can get used to a diet of rice.


* The relevance of the list, which is not intended to be comprehensive is as follows:

Edward Jenner in 1796 made the first successful vaccination against smallpox. In 1979, WHO declared smallpox an eradicated disease; surely the success story of the twentieth century;
Joseph Lister introduced the first widespread use of antiseptic (carbolic acid) into surgery in the 1860s;
Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin who discovered the vaccine against tuberculosis in 1908 which bears their name (bacilli Calmette and Guérin, BCG) and which is still the only one in widespread and effective use;
Frederick Banting and Charles Best engineered the first successful extraction of insulin from the pancreas of the deceased, human and bovine, in 1920 which led, in a few short years, to large scale production and the long-term, effectuve treatment of Type 1 diabetes;
Howard Florey and Ernst Chain for the development, by 1938, of pencillin, the first broad-spectrum antibiotic - Alexander Fleming gets no kudos from me, shared Nobel prize notwithstanding; despite having noticed it in 1929, he did little or nothing with it;
Jonas Salk who developed the first effective vaccine against polio in 1955, just in time for me to get one of the first shots;
Christian Barnard who performed the first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967 in South Africa.

** Patrician Romans, Royalty, the nobility from around 1700 and merchant classes in Europe from around 1800.

*** A term first attributed to John Stuart Mill in the House of Commons speaking against the Irish Land Bill of 1868: 'they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.'