Short video spoiler history: The beginning of modern warfare

Chapter 102 Cholera
Ming, Jinling City.

Zhu Yuanzhang really thought about it carefully for a while. The problem of Shu Han was nothing more than a small territory and a small population. With 100 million young and strong college students, if the food and grass could be supplied, then let alone Cao Cao in the north, you can even plant the red star flag in Europe and Africa.

There were only a few major battles in the Three Kingdoms period with more than 100,000 single-sided battles. An army of one million basically resulted in a crushing victory. If a million-strong army was given and the other parties remained unchanged, any of the three parties could unify the world.

However, there are 100 million college students. Who would be foolish enough to send them to fight in the war? These are talents who have received more than ten years of scientific education.

You know, people who have studied for a few years and can write are considered to be wise men in the area. These people are the backbone and the key talents for future cultural governance.

Not to mention their own qualities and abilities. Not only do they know all the major events that will happen in future history, they also possess various leading scientific knowledge that can actually enhance national strength.

Fertilizers and steam engines alone were enough to cause the enemy a lot of trouble. Wars have always been fought with food and pay first and foremost. Zhu Yuanzhang didn't know how incompetent the commander had to be to defeat an army that had a numerical advantage but was only getting full pay to defeat an army with half pay.

Let alone 100 million, even if 10 soldiers were to be exchanged for 10 college students, Zhu Yuanzhang would not hesitate.
These are just delusions. Zhu Yuanzhang shook his head and dispelled these thoughts.

Zhu Biao still felt it was novel, as if these college students were willing to do anything just to get internship certificates?

That doesn't make sense. Is the talent overflow in later generations so serious?

"Who is Zhai Tianlin? What's the plot?"

"100 college students with real talent are enough. Any more is a waste."

【Cholera appeared very early in Chinese history, and it appeared very frequently in medical texts. For example, Zhang Zhongjing's Treatise on Febrile and Miscellaneous Diseases in the late Han Dynasty said: What is the disease called cholera? Answer: Vomiting and diarrhea, this is called cholera.】

[The "Emergency Prescriptions for the Elbow" says: The cause of cholera is eating too much, or eating raw and cold food, fatty and greasy food, and drinking wine, and being exposed to the wind, wearing wet thin clothes, sitting in the open air, or sleeping without a cover at night.]

[In other words, this cholera is most likely acute gastroenteritis or some other gastrointestinal disease]

[So the cholera mentioned in this ancient medical book is not the same as the cholera we know, which killed more than 1.4 million people.]

[The cholera we know today can be called true cholera, which refers to the gastrointestinal infection caused by the contamination of food or drinking water by Vibrio cholerae. It develops quickly and violently, and has extremely high infection and mortality rates.]

[Up to now, the Class A infectious diseases in our country are plague and cholera, because these two diseases have killed countless people in history]

[Cholera was not discovered until the 19th century, and its original source was the Ganges (mainstream view)]

[Later, it was spread to China through sea and land trade. Luo Ergang wrote that the cholera was introduced into China in the 1820th year of Jiaqing in the Qing Dynasty, that is, . It was first seen in the southern region and later spread to the north.]

[After the onset of cholera, people will vomit and have diarrhea. The amount of fluid ejected is very large. At first, it can be seen as yellow, but soon the stool will become as clear as rice water. The eye sockets will become sunken due to excessive dehydration, the skin will wrinkle, the tear ducts will empty, and the blood will become tar-like and coagulate in the blood vessels. In the end, the deceased will look like a blue, shriveled corpse.]

Ming, Jinling City.

When Zhu Yuanzhang heard that cholera had killed 1.4 million people, he couldn't help but break out in a cold sweat. If this thing in later generations was the same cholera recorded in ancient prescriptions, the consequences would be unimaginable. Fortunately, it only appeared a few hundred years later.

Even so, everyone in front of the Fengtian Hall still had a solemn expression. The prevention and control experience of any large-scale epidemic is valuable.

Why are there so many and such large-scale epidemics in later generations?

There is no doubt that the development of transportation, daily exchanges and frequent trade among countries have played an extremely critical role in this.

"Why does this Ganges sound so familiar?" Zhu Yuanzhang vaguely remembered that he seemed to have seen this name many times in the comment section, but he forgot where exactly.

"It's a river in Tianzhu."

"Oh, it's the place they later called India." Zhu Yuanzhang suddenly realized, but then he got angry again: "Where?!"

Zheng He visited many countries during his voyages to the West and also stopped in Calicut more than once!
This time, Zhu Yuanzhang's face darkened as he was bound to have to deal with various places along the coast of India.
[In 1854, cholera hit London, causing the death of a large number of people in a short period of time]

[At that time, it was generally believed that the transmission routes of many infectious diseases, including cholera, were the poison gas theory. For example, Chadwick, the famous father of public health in the UK at that time, and even Nightingale held such a view.]

[Because the sanitation in London was very poor at that time, they believed that the sewage, feces, garbage and other things that were everywhere in London at that time, and the poisonous gas emitted by them were the main causes of infectious diseases, which of course included cholera.]

[Of course, we now know that this theory is extremely wrong. In fact, the transmission of infectious diseases is mainly divided into infection sources and transmission media. The infection sources are what we call bacteria and viruses, and the transmission media include water, food, air, saliva (contact), mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, lice, rats, etc.]

[The large-scale outbreak of cholera is actually spread by contaminated water sources]

[With this understanding, it is actually enough to deal with many infectious diseases. In ancient China, although bacteria and viruses were not known, and such accurate theories were not proposed, people generally chose to close the city and isolate people when facing the plague. Their behavior is the same as the prevention and control of various infectious diseases today.]

In Jinling City, many doctors in pharmacies and clinics were ashamed. The theory that poisonous gas caused disease was actually no different from the theory of miasma or evil spirits entering the body.

If you look through local chronicles, you will find that small-scale epidemics have never stopped breaking out in all dynasties, although people have explored and summarized a set of effective prevention methods based on thousands of years of experience in prevention and control.

However, the underdeveloped science has led to insufficient understanding of infectious diseases, and naturally the effectiveness of treatment and prevention programs will be much worse.

In front of the Fengtian Hall, Zhang Yuanshi of the Imperial Medical Bureau had a solemn expression. With just a few words, Tianmu had already revealed the way the plague spread, meaning that as long as the transmission routes were cut off, all kinds of plague would naturally disintegrate.

In other words, as long as a city's water supply, public health and other conditions are good, the probability of an epidemic occurring is very small.

Even though there were miracle doctors who recognized water and food as the pathways for spreading the plague, no one realized that air, saliva, and even various mosquitoes could spread the plague. These few words are actually valuable experience, experience gained with human lives.

In this way, we can examine the plagues of various dynasties recorded in local government records. Their causes may be complex, but the transmission routes are basically the same. Finding the transmission route and specifically cutting it off is the right way to eliminate the plague. For example, if it is transmitted through water sources, then we should abandon the polluted water sources, and if it is transmitted through mosquitoes and flies, then we should specifically kill mosquitoes and flies.

A kind word can clear away the clouds and bring light to the sun.

[Back to the cholera outbreak in London, the urban sanitation conditions in Europe at that time were really hard to describe. Although medieval Europeans hated the smell, they did not reject feces itself, and some even studied its medicinal value.]

[Martin Luther, a German monk in the 16th century, would eat a teaspoon of his own feces every day, and French court attendants in the 18th century would dry their feces, grind them into powder, and then inhale them through their noses]

[Can you imagine thousands of pigs, cows, horses, stray cats and dogs wandering around the streets of New York, defecating wantonly, and pedestrians and vehicles trampling on the feces and slowly turning them into a dense carpet? ]

[Can you imagine walking down the streets of Paris, the romantic capital of the 17th and 18th centuries, and being hit by shit flying out of the window at any time? Can you imagine the stench of feces and urine everywhere in the Louvre? Can you imagine having two piles of feces in your home right now?]

[What is even more despairing is the endless flow of excrement into rivers and into groundwater. Every citizen, whether willingly or not, consumes an average of two teaspoons of excrement per day.]

[At that time, there was no centralized water supply and centralized disinfection management of tap water. Drinking water all depended on this natural river. In addition, hygiene was not taken seriously, and feces and drinking water were excreted in the same river. If there were patients with infectious diseases upstream, once their daily necessities or feces were discharged into the river, the downstream would suffer.]

[In this natural hotbed, it is not surprising that a large-scale outbreak of cholera occurred. Cholera then swept across Europe with a mortality rate of 50%, accompanied by the pace of the defeated army, and was brought to the Americas by Europeans, leaving corpses everywhere.]

Tang Dynasty, Chang'an City.

Li Shimin's frown never relaxed. Listening to Tianmu's dirty words at this moment, he felt disgusted but had to listen carefully.

Regarding littering, there have been clear laws prohibiting it in every dynasty, and it is accompanied by various punishments, such as what Han Feizi mentioned: According to the law of the Yin Dynasty, anyone who throws ashes on the road will have his hand cut off.

After the Qin and Han dynasties, the severity of punishment was reduced a lot, but littering was still explicitly prohibited, such as the Tang law: Anyone who breaks through the wall to carry out filth will be beaten with sixty sticks.

With this kind of intensity, there were countless outbreaks of plagues of all sizes in local areas, and Li Shimin could hardly imagine the "shit flying outside the window" like in Europe.

Nowadays, there are honey collectors in Chang'an City to help collect and dispose of feces. This is not a big problem, but the water source needs to be protected with special care.

The unified water supply and unified disinfection management mentioned in the sky curtain is also a good idea, but the workload is too large and cannot be considered for the time being.

In the courtyard full of spring, Miss Gan Tang and others suddenly realized that the cleanliness of the city streets and personal appearance in later generations, to such an outrageous degree, was not just out of the love of beauty.

The men and women there, no matter their attire or appearance, were much cleaner than the smelly men in Chang'an City. Especially the women, with their long, smooth black hair and delicate makeup, they were the envy of countless women.

[At that time, there was a doctor named John Snow. In 1846, he published a pamphlet called "On the Mode of Transmission of Cholera". He believed that the main cause of cholera was still toxins, but the toxins were transmitted through drinking water.]

[After the London cholera outbreak, he conducted a self-funded investigation in such a large area. He investigated every death case there. Wherever a resident died, he marked a small black square on the map.]

[From the map he compiled, you can see that the black bars are the statistics of death cases. The closer you get to the center of the map, the more deaths there are.]

[That place was a well, and John Snow believed that the well was the culprit, so he asked the municipal department to seal the well. As a result, after the well was sealed, the incidence rate dropped, and the epidemic dissipated soon after.]

[Having said so much, in fact, the direct cause of death of cholera patients is dehydration. After realizing this, the most effective way to treat cholera is to inject normal saline into the patient. If normal saline is not available, you can use 1L of water to prepare a solution of half a spoon of salt and six spoons of sugar, and give it to the patient.]

[Of course, it is also possible that the patient cannot drink at all, or vomits immediately after drinking. Later, Wang Mengying, a famous doctor in the late Qing Dynasty, proposed a method that can effectively treat vomiting and diarrhea, which is Jishibaisan.]

[It is to boil chicken droppings in water and give it to the patient to drink. Later, the chicken droppings were changed to silkworm droppings, which is called silkworm droppings soup.]

Ming, Jinling City.

In the palace, clerks began to write down various recipes.

"What is physiological saline?" Liu Ji and others were also scratching their heads. Is this name just simple saline? Why add the word "physiological" to it?

Moreover, this is an infusion into the body through injection, so it is definitely not simple saline solution.

Tianmulai mentioned an alternative method, which can be taken.

The video was played again at this point. Although it only talked about the causes and consequences of cholera, the governance methods involved in it brought new ideas to the court. Of course, the better choice is definitely to prevent it before it happens.

"I think the epidemic in later generations was transmitted through contact?" Many people recalled the situation at that time. Many medical staff were fully armed and wrapped tightly.

"Yes, that's it!" Zhang Yuanshi suddenly realized, and then thought that if the transmission medium of the plague could not be determined for the time being, it could be isolated through similar methods.

He shared his thoughts, and everyone nodded, saying that having protection is definitely better than having no protection.

As Zhu Yuanzhang listened to their discussions, he was thinking about the sanitation issues of each city, how to ensure the safety of water sources, the treatment of domestic sewage, etc. There is no doubt that this model of unified management and treatment is better.

Otherwise, ordinary people would not care so much and would definitely discharge the waste into the nearby river.

If it was just one city, it would be okay, but with so many cities, the amount of work and the cost alone would be a astronomical figure.

These are places that cannot be seen from the sky. These infrastructures ensure the health and safety of residents in so many cities and ensure the smooth operation of cities with such a large population.

Zhu Yuanzhang was helpless, wondering when Tianmu would reveal the location of the gold and silver mines, and he was a little short of money.
(End of this chapter)