Man vs. Nature and the Optimism of the Guilded Age

The Guilded Age (1870-1914) was characterized by an intense optimism. The world was reaping all the rewards of its previous progress without the scars of the First World War yet. Huge advancements swept the globe in every field, one notable area of development being vaccines.

When I was in kindergarten, my older sister got chicken pox. She was kept home from school, quarantined, and had strange cream put all over her body. For the dramatic 6-year-old that I was, it seemed to me that she was dying. Two hundred years ago, she might have been.

Bacteria and viruses

Chicken pox, however, was not the scariest pox out there. Small pox was a killer. In 1796, Edward Jenner produced a vaccine for small pox using cow pox. This idea that man could overcome a deadly virus fueled the optimism into the Guilded Age, and by 1900, there were successful vaccines against five viruses and bacteria.

That was huge for society. Man had become industrious and intelligent, productive and creative, but Mother Nature had stood firm. We were finding ways to avoid her, but the birth of vaccines showed she was beginning to be outsmarted.

Looking at the public health scene of today, it is clear that Mother Nature has found a way to fight back. There are what scientists are calling "superbugs" on the rampage, resistant to any drug that we could throw at them, the cure for HIV and the associated AIDS remains elusive, and our own bodies are fighting against us through many forms of cancer.

I don't believe that we aren't meant to live forever. It seems we are hitting a wall of some kind, but for a few glorious decades, we, the underdogs, were on the rise. And it felt so good.

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