The 1940s Experience🇺🇸

The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure. The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe. The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table. The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties. The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in. The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior. The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right. The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house. The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse. The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it. Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help. You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time. The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody. The next one is being drafted now.

The richest man in America rebuilt American medicine around the laboratory, then went home to a homeopath and lived to 97. His father was a travelling salesman who called himself Dr William Levingston. He was not a doctor, and his name was not Levingston. William Avery Rockefeller, known as Devil Bill, worked the backroads as a "botanic physician" selling elixirs out of a wagon, and when he died they buried him under the false name. His son went into oil. At Standard Oil's peak, John D. Rockefeller controlled around 90% of American refining. In 1910 a schoolteacher with no medical degree, Abraham Flexner, published a report on every medical school in North America. The Carnegie Foundation paid for it. His brother Simon was running the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research at the time. The report said most of the schools were unfit to exist. Within twenty years roughly half of them had closed: the homeopathic colleges, the eclectic colleges, and five of the seven schools training Black doctors. Then the money arrived. Rockefeller's General Education Board, which Abraham Flexner later joined, poured tens of millions into the schools that rebuilt themselves on his model. Laboratories, full-time professors, research departments. The doctor of the new century would find the disease in a test tube and fight it with chemistry, and every serious school in America was built to produce him. The man paying for all of it had other arrangements for his own body. For decades his personal physician was Hamilton Biggar, a homeopath. Rockefeller took his advice, took his walks, and died in 1937 at 97. So the son of a fake doctor paid to manufacture the real ones, and would not let one near him. You got the laboratory. He kept the family recipe.

Procter & Gamble made soap. In 1911 they took an ingredient they had developed for soap, put it in a tin, and sold it to American women as food. The ingredient was cottonseed oil. Cotton seed was what the mill threw away. It rotted in heaps by the roadside. The raw seed poisons pigs. The oil comes out red, bitter and stinking, and its other buyers made roofing tar and explosives. P&G bought the mills, hardened the oil with hydrogen gas to make cheaper soap, and noticed that what came out of the vat looked exactly like lard. So they called it Crisco, and they called it pure. Modern. Clean. Nothing like the dirty old butter and lard your mother used. They gave away cookbooks with Crisco in every recipe. They found a rabbi to announce that the Hebrew race had been waiting 4,000 years for it. Crisco launched in 1911. The first heart attack in the American medical literature was described in 1912. Over the next 40 years Americans ate less and less butter, more and more of what was in P&G's tin, and heart disease became the biggest killer in the country. Butter had an alibi. What P&G needed was somebody official to ignore it. In 1948 the American Heart Association was a small club of doctors with no money. P&G's hit radio show ran a contest for them. Listeners posted in $1.75 million, and the club became the national authority on the human heart overnight. In 1960 P&G launched Crisco Oil. In 1961 the American Heart Association told the nation to swap butter for vegetable oil. That advice is still on your doctor's wall. Years later it came out that hardening the oil made trans fats, and trans fats were killing people. The industry pinned everything on that one word, changed the recipe, and declared margarine safe. It was never only the trans fat. When doctors in Sydney moved heart patients off butter and onto plain safflower oil, more of them died. When Minnesota ran the biggest trial of all, on corn oil, the old people on the oil died faster. That result went into a basement for 40 years. The problem is the oil. It is an industrial fat, washed out of seeds with a petrol solvent, bleached, and deodorised so you cannot smell what it is. It goes rancid in the bottle, in the fryer and in you, and it sits in your body fat for years. Americans now carry more than twice as much of it as their grandparents did. P&G sold Crisco in 2002 and walked away. The American Heart Association still sells its red tick to bottles of seed oil, for a fee. Butter is cream, shaken. It has never once needed a radio show.