Ken Mathias

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 Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims.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.

If you had trusted the settled science of the day, here is how it would have gone. 1890s: you dose the baby with Bayer's new cough syrup, the non-addictive alternative to morphine, marketed for children. It was heroin. They named it after the German for heroic. 1900s: you rub calomel teething powder on your infant's gums. It is a mercury compound, and it leaves a generation with pink disease. Swollen, peeling hands and feet, screaming for months, and some of them died. 1910s: you cook in Crisco, launched by a soap and candle company, because cottonseed oil is modern and lard is what your mother used. The process that made it solid produced trans fat, banned outright a century later. 1920s: you drink Radithor, certified radioactive water, on prescription. Eben Byers took fourteen hundred bottles for his vitality. His jaw was removed in pieces and he was buried in a lead coffin. 1930s: a chemist dissolves a new sulfa drug in diethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. It kills 107 people, mostly children, and only then does America give the FDA power to demand safety testing. 1940s: your doctor lights a Camel in the surgery. More doctors smoke them than any other brand, and the advert runs in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which sold him the page. 1950s: DDT is sprayed over your kitchen, your garden and your children at school. The man who found its insecticidal properties has already been given a Nobel Prize. 1960s: your wife takes thalidomide for morning sickness because it is remarkably safe. More than ten thousand children are born with missing and shortened limbs. 1970s: the country puts down the butter and picks up the margarine, on the instruction of the American Heart Association. The fat everybody switched to was banned in 2015 as unsafe at any level. 1980s: the fat comes out of everything and sugar goes back in to make it edible. Obesity begins a climb it has never come off. 1990s: your father is prescribed OxyContin, because fewer than one per cent get addicted. The company later pleads guilty to criminal misbranding, and the overdose count runs into hundreds of thousands. 2000s: you take Vioxx for your knee. It is pulled in 2004, and the FDA's own safety officer estimates tens of thousands of excess heart attacks. Not one of those was fringe. Every one had a professional body, a literature and a man in a white coat standing behind it. Nobody who followed that advice was stupid. They were obedient, to the most qualified people available. Settled is a word about money. It means the questions stopped being funded, so they stopped being asked. So which of today's instructions will your grandchildren read out in disbelief. The oil washed in hexane and built into every cell you own. The statin that blocks the pathway making your hormones, to prevent one heart attack per hundred people. The injection where a third of the loss is muscle. The infant formula built out of vegetable oil. All settled. None of it funded to be otherwise.