By Juan Fermín
Modern medicine is sold to us as mankind’s greatest triumph. We used to die at 35, then vaccines and antibiotics arrived and now we live to 80. That story is a carefully curated lie.
Right now your body is home to trillions of bacteria, billions of viruses, and thousands of fungi and parasites. You are a walking jungle, and 99.9 % of those “germs” are either harmless or keeping you alive. Yet every few years we’re told the next bug is going to end civilization. Fear keeps the ratings up and the syringes full.
Real history shows a different pattern. Every major plague that supposedly “almost ended humanity” was preceded by the same thing: war, famine, drought, or massive climate disruption that starved people first. Only then did the microbes finish off the already weakened.
- 536–540 AD: Two gigantic volcanic eruptions blanket the planet in ash. Crops fail for a decade. Then the Plague of Justinian.
- 1340s: The Great Famine and decades of floods soften Europe up. Then the Black Death.
- 1816: Mount Tambora erupts → “Year Without a Summer” → global starvation → the first cholera pandemic.
The germ was never the star. It was the undertaker.
Life-expectancy lies The “people died at 30–40” stat is a trick. Remove infant mortality and death from war/famine and anyone who reached 15 had a solid shot at 60–70—if they ate well. Kings and emperors prove it:
- Augustus Caesar – 75
- Ramesses II – 90–91
- Tiberius – 77
- China’s Qianlong Emperor – 87 (1799 AD)
Zero vaccines. Zero statins. Just varied food and no moldy bread seven days a week.
We finally solved famine. Great job. Now the #1 killer is the grocery store. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s—every major cause of death in 2025 is tied to sugar, seed oils, and processed junk. We replaced starvation with voluntary over-eating.
Even COVID followed the ancient script: the hardest hit were the very old and the very fat—people whose immune systems had been wrecked for decades by the Standard American Diet.
The erased codex Here’s the smoking gun almost nobody talks about.
For over a century, every American doctor and pharmacist had one authoritative reference: the United States Dispensatory. First published 1833, by the 21st edition in 1926 (Wood & LaWall) it was 1,800+ pages and roughly 75–80 % of the remedies were natural—herbs, roots, minerals, animal extracts, whole-plant tinctures, with dosages and clinical notes.
Then the purge began. New editors (notably Arthur Osol starting in the 1940s) rewrote the book to favor patentable synthetics. By 1955 natural entries had shrunk to ~25 %. By 1960 the Dispensatory was dead, replaced by pharma-friendly texts. The old knowledge didn’t fail—it was deliberately buried because you can’t patent a dandelion.
The biggest leaps in lifespan happened before antibiotics and vaccines: clean water, sewers, refrigeration, abundant calories, and peace after 1945. Give the body real food and it handles almost anything nature throws at it.
The microbes were never the enemy. Weak, poisoned, overfed bodies are.
And the proof that we once knew better is sitting on Archive.org right now—download the 1926 United States Dispensatory before they memory-hole that too.
Read it. Share it. The lost medicine is calling.
— Juan Fermín EarthsLostHistory.com