Dealing with illness, then and now

I’ve been suffering from a nasty cold/flu bug the last week or so. It’s not terribly serious, but enough to make life relatively miserable and to stop me from some of my normal routines.

Of course, my medical situation is not life threatening, whereas during the 19th century and 20th century (in which I lived for 57 years), the American population was subject to a number of killer diseases. Medica...