I wish the anti-Western-medicine bunch had the voices of old aunties and uncles whispering in their ears.

My uncle Hart was born in 1910. His older brother died in 1929, of gangrene. It took him 7 months to die, in agony and delerium. We were all together in 1980, and there was some rotting hamburger in the cooler. Uncle Hart was weeping and I asked why. He said, "the smell made me think of my brother William. I didn't want to be with him even though he was lonely. That is what his room smelled of, that summer. The docter kept cutting and cutting on his leg, and still he died." With modern antibiotics, he would not have suffered or died.

My great-aunts Helene, Lavinia, and Eva all died in about 1910, of diptheria. I am not sure of their birthdates, but my grandmother, who was the oldest (1885) thought they were born about a year apart, in 1890, 91, and 92.