Homebrew antibiotics, and other things a time-traveller could help with

I've read in a few places that honey was used right up until WWII as an antibacterial agent, so perhaps that might be a place to start?

If your time traveler was a bacteriologist or infectious disease specialist and had a decent microscope I'd buy it. If he's Philip the pizza delivery boy, he's probably going to kill a lot of people with his concoctions

Torgo said:

This isn't a question aimed at any book of mine, but something that occurred to me as I am rereading Patrick O'Brian. In Desolation Island, my latest voyage, the horrible old Leopard has been brought low by an epidemic of 'gaol-fever', which Wikipedia informs me is actually Murine Typhus, and very susceptible to treatment with Antibiotics.

I'm peering over the shoulder of Doctor Maturin as he grapples with the outbreak, and, as ever, I put the book down every now and again to consider how a time-traveller might be able to help him out. Would it be possible to manufacture efficacious antibiotics on board ship, or given a convenient port? I guess you could let the soft tack go mouldy and hope for penicillin, but I suspect you'd be as likely to get ergot.

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Honey is a decent antibacterial, as noted. It's mentioned by Galen as a wound dressing. I think it's in Avidenna, but it's been way to long for me to be sure.

Moldy bread with a particular kind of strikingly blue mold pattern is referenced in a couple of Welsh medical mss.--the mold in question is in fact is a variety of penicillium. The difficultly is that while some produce a substance that inhibits bacterial growth, some of them produce a toxin.

But Foxglove was used as a tea for heart problems (digitalis), St. John's Wort was used for depression and PMS, willow bark tea was used for pain (and it really smells and tastes like aspirin).

GeorgeK said:

If your time traveler was a bacteriologist or infectious disease specialist and had a decent microscope I'd buy it. If he's Philip the pizza delivery boy, he's probably going to kill a lot of people with his concoctions

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My first thought as well.

Unless the time traveler has some extensive alternative medicine or other specialized training, he is more than likely not going to help.

This is one of the many subplots/motifs in Charlie Stross' Merchant Princes books.

The sort of database you mentioned would be nice, but it would have so many branches as to be unmanageable.

Fresh garlic is easier to handle and more effective than most antibiotics. But it is fairly easy to culture certain antibiotics such Penicillin as and some tetracyclines; the trouble comes with extracting it from the culture and purifying it.

There have been time travel books that have incorporated antibiotic production.

In Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, she has a WW2 nurse thrust back a couple hundred years. She works out penicillin with recognition of which mold, along with figuring out a way to extract it and inject it. It's very believable.

Eric Flint wrote (along with others) a series beginning with 1632, where a modern West Virginia town ends up in 1632 Germany. How they got there isn't very believable. If you ignore that, though, the effects and events after are very interesting. They find chemical production of chloramphenicol to be the easiest antibiotic to mass produce. Again, very believable.

Is this what you're looking for?

A time-traveller could at least tell Dr Maturin to quit giving mercury to his patients.

Torgo said:

Would it? I'd have thought most of the useful content is in Wikipedia already - it'd need to be restructured, but...

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The restructuring would be the hard part. I can conceive of it, as a finished product, but getting there would not be easy. It is interesting to look at what has led to what; sometimes the connections are not obvious. Then there were the changes in world-view that allowed people to notice connections.

Snick said:

The sort of database you mentioned would be nice, but it would have so many branches as to be unmanageable.

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It's the kind of taxonomic expert system that are used a lot in the sciences for identification of a species or disease.

Slight digression, but it is an interesting corollary of how society has developed that I think a time traveller from now would have less useful knowledge to impart than a time traveller from say 100 years ago. Most branches of our technology have developed and subdivided so far that nowadays no one has a meaningful grasp of even a significant part of it, and experts in a particular field can know only about their field.

I lived in rural India for a couple of years and it was striking there how pretty much everyone had a reasonably full understanding of all the technology they used. Within any village there would be at least one person who could make or repair any tool, implement or vehicle they used, and most had a pretty comprehensive knowledge of the medicinal qualities of local plants. As for us, take even something as ubiquitous as a car. Thirty years ago you could repair or rebuild almost any part of any car, given some light engineering skills and a bit of ingenuity. Now, if one of the many chips that control every aspect of the vehicle goes, how the hell do you even start understanding it, let alone repairing it?

Similarly, even 100 years ago most common medicines were derived from natural sources, and there were few enough that anyone interested enough could probably research what they originated from and find that material themselves. Nowadays most are manufactured via complex (and heavily patented) chemical processes which even if you understood you probably couldn't replicate without the conveniently labelled lab chemicals.

I appear to have gone off on one here, and rest assured I'm not one of those batty survivalists you refer to, but it is an interesting twist to the time traveller concept. Personally, if I was an early 19th Century sailor with typhus who was visited by a time traveller I would prefer it to be someone from the mid 20th century with a general education rather than someone from say the mid 21st century for whom all drugs have been replaced by marvellously effective gene therapies that they have no idea whatever how to make.

Interesting, anguswalker - is knowledge going back to belonging to the few - even though it is apparently available to millions?

Anguswalker makes a solid point. I personally know lots of tidbits for a variety of fields thanks to Boy Scouts, watching ER programs and having some higher education. That does not mean I can whip up a combustion engine or tell people how to make plastics ("A polymer? Zounds, he speaks in tongues!") or anything apart from, "Well, if you only had X I could show you how to make Y."

Our skills and knowledge is adapted to a technology and data driven society. Remove those tools and tech and you are in an alien environment as surely as a traveler from the past.

Then again, with a solar cell to keep a charge on the thing I can definitely run a little iPod Touch that has enough storage space to jumpstart all of civilization from nothing to high technology if I remembered to download the iPastTraveler app. That's the one that has textbooks, diagrams, processes and parts lists for everything needed to rebuild our culture. For a book that's way too much of a copout. For the movie "Army of Darkness" a trunk with chemistry and physics textbooks rattling around is de rigueur movie silliness.