How Far We Have Come

I cannot insist enough that you take just a little time and read or listen to this story over at NPR.

It's one thing to watch HBO's wonderful series "Rome" and reflect on how miserable life was in those days, even for the wealthiest and most powerful individuals. The world was not a comfortable place 2,000 years ago, really.

And it's one thing to appreciate the fact that what I will very haphazardly refer to as "modern medicine" has only been around about a century. It's funny to watch a quasi-historical movie like Sleepy Hollow and giggle at all of the wacky "scientific" equipment Johnny depp has to play with. And it's one thing to marvel that it wasn't until 1939, just 66 years ago, that the miralce drug, the drug that literally changed the world - penicillin - was used to stem bacterial diseases.

All of those things are amazing to marvel at. And yet they are very much historical. There aren't really any first-hand witnesses of those moments around anymore. Our grandparents might remember the rise of penicillin, but even they would have been very young at the time.

This is why it's so utterly incomprehensible that the man in this story, who is younger than either of my parents, lived through (and in many ways continues to live with) a procedure so bizarre, so archane, so B-horror-movie-esque. It's barely comprehensible to me that we used to give people lobotomies with no functional understanding of the brain at all. But to do it this way? With (I'm not making this up) ice picks? Ice picks? In the eyeballs?

It's absurd, horrifying, amazing, sickening. Most of all, it seems like one of those things we really should all know about, we should all remember with a degree of shame and apprehension - and yet ... almost no one knows anything about it at all.