Consumptive Capitalism -- Timothy Snyder

[erronis]

https://snyder.substack.com/p/consumptive-capitalism

On MAHA and Expensive Suffering -- A Guest Post by Sara Silverstein

Professor Sara Silverstein is someone to whom I listen on issues of health and history. This essay helps us to situate the present American health drama in the history of health care, and thereby to see much more clearly what we face. It draws from her forthcoming book For Your Health and Ours: An Eastern European History of Global Health. Professor Silverstein is currently at work on her next book, provisionally entitled Corporal Capitalism.

Consumptive Capitalism, by Sara Silverstein

Until very recently, tuberculosis was common, expensive, and lethal in the United States. It defined the lives and brought the deaths of many of the people who created our world. We have forgotten about all this because antibiotics, public health, and improved living conditions have largely erased the disease.

The current administration's health policy rests on nostalgia rather than knowledge. It romanticizes a harsh past, a time when few and desperate choices were available to Americans. Because all that was available then was hope, many suffered for the profit of the wellness industry of the day. A few portraits of life with the disease can help us to imagine, and perhaps to prevent, a return to such profiteering.

. . .

Tuberculosis, known in the past as consumption, has infected somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of all humans ever, and it possibly infected more than ninety percent of the population in industrializing countries during its peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not everyone who is infected develops an active disease. Whether they become sick depends partly on social and economic conditions that affect the immune system. Only about a fifth of those people who became sick recovered permanently and absolutely before the discovery of modern antibiotics. And of course tuberculosis is only one of the infectious diseases that once caused a vast portion of the population to live with chronic illness and disability.

The experiences of Kafka and Kelles-Krauz were normal. Illness was normal. And so basic historical fact casts a bitterly absurd light on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) slogan. Americans, MAHA leadership tells us, live with unprecedented rates of chronic disease. This is a misrepresentation - a counting phantom that arises from longer lives, more careful recording, and omitting historical sources of chronic disease. Offering solutions that reject science and public health pushes us backwards into a past of shorter lives and more variety in lethal illness. This is perverse.

. . .

[Goonch]

1. ;-{)........