We often take it for granted that doctors can successfully treat most of humankind's ailments. In fact, we're usually dumbfounded when they can't. But it wasn't that long ago that doctors had extremely limited resources at their disposal in fighting disease. If you were sick in 1900, for example, your doctor couldn't do much more than provide comfort until your body defeated the illness, or it defeated you. The doctor in 1900 had only a few treatments in his or her black bag, including morphine and aspirin to ease pain, quinine to fight off malaria, smallpox vaccine, and digitalis for heart failure.
How that black bag has grown in the past century! Medicines and treatments now exist for almost every illness known, and doctors can now draw upon a vast arsenal of drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tools that they could not even dream of in 1900.
This activity shows how physicians over the past century would have handled three afflictions: infection, kidney failure, and diabetes. All you have to do is complain to the doctor, then see how he or she responds.
