Faith Salie Quotes
Shaking hands is a pretty good way to get yourself sick, not necessarily with Ebola, but with a million other germs that can cause colds and flu.
Salie, Faith. Approval Junkie: Adventures in Caring Too Much. Crown Archetype, 2016.
This is an amazing quotation and shows that the Ancient Romans who had a very sophisticated medical technology had a notion of germs and microbes. Ancient Rome was the first organized nation for which health, medicine, public health, and medical research were governmental functions unlike Greece and other civilizations where health was a personal function. Roman policy emphasized prevention unlike the Greeks. Sanitation and water supply and quality were government responsibilities and the Roman standard was not reached in the rest of the world until the 18th century. Heath and medicine was also a major military responsibility. The Roman Empire depended on its army, and trained professional soldiers. Disease was a greater risk to the soldiers than were battlefield casualties, and the Romans had a strong vested interest in keeping these highly trained men alive and healthy—not just the wealthy Roman citizens. The Romans were open to techniques that were developed throughout the Empire and beyond and tended to adopt all good ideas and a few bad ones as well While they had advanced surgery, the public health was the strongest aspect of Roman medicine and health and this notion of germs and disease. Remember that the writer was not a medical or scientific man, but was just indicating what was general wisdom of the Roman elite.
The South has always been backward compared to the rest of the nation. By the 21st century the gap had gotten narrower. However, one of the reasons that Mrs. Roosevelt was unpopular with the Southern whites was not only that she was an outspoken critic of segregation and associated with Negroes, but she would publically point out the areas of Southern backwardness. However, the upper and middle class Southerners resented anyone—especially “outsiders” publicly exposing Southern weakness.
Virtually every spread of virus caused disease that has occurred in the late 20th century and onward was spread to different regions by people, who in an age of rapid travel, are what the public health scientists call “the vectors” — the carriers of the disease. In earlier times it was animals like rats who spread the disease.
Faith Coley Salie is an American journalist, writer, actress, comedian, television and radio host and Rhodes scholar who grew up in Georgia. She is a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. She hosts Science Goes To The Movies on PBS and CUNY TV. Her first book, Approval Junkie, a collection of humorous essays, was published by Crown in April 2016.
