television infomercials for cures the “medical establishment doesn’t want
you to know about.”) As flimsy medical interventions crumbled under
their own weight, the reputation of doctors began to grow, and as Paul
Starr has so thoroughly described, the “social transformation of American
medicine” meant that Americans were able to couple their new postwar
prosperity with a renewed interest in health, with a shift from the
(necessary) preoccupation with infectious diseases to a fixation on the
betterment of chronic illnesses, like cancer, heart disease, neurosis, and
arthritis.^25
Infant mortality plummeted, life expectancy doubled, dread diseases
were alleviated, and, on occasion, cancer was able to be cured in the
decade of the possible in the 1950s. Perhaps the antibiotic revolution’s
greatest contribution in the transformation of the philosophical outlook of
Westerners was not a loss of fear of infection but an openness by
physicians (and their patients) that antimicrobial medicines were making
it safe to implant foreign materials into human beings. “In 1950, about
230,000 physicians were practicing in the United States, and the
overwhelming majority had left medical school well before the first
antibiotics appeared.”^26 Yet, it was those physicians who pioneered the use
of implants as their scientific partners simultaneously innovated implant
materials, like alloys, plastics, and transistors.
A certain clairvoyance was shared among the healers and dreamers—an
idea that started four hundred years ago—an inclination that a line and
race of inventions could be synthesized for implantation into the fabric of
the human body, under the auspices of antibiotics.