Struck by the power of the simple invention So why did we not hear more about it?
“I was really taken aback,” Dr Dilip Mahalanabis recalled of arriving at Bangaon’s city hospital in 1971. Bangaon is now on the border between India and Bangladesh. At that time, though, it was in the middle of a refugee crisis and a vicious cholera outbreak precipitated by the Bangladesh Liberation war.
A treatment for cholera’s deadly vomiting and diarrhoea — intravenous saline — had been discovered back in 1906. But the conditions in Bangaon hospital made the use of saline drips all but impossible. Patients were tightly packed into rooms that were swimming in excrement. “In order to treat these people with IV saline, you literally had to kneel down in their faeces and their vomit,” Mahalanabis explained to the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 2009.
There weren’t enough trained staff and there wasn’t enough IV fluid, so Mahalanabis tried something else. He gave people glucose and salts dissolved in boiled water. He kept drums of this oral rehydration solution nearby and told patients’ relatives to keep giving them mugs of the stuff. If they were properly rehydrated, it would taste unpleasant but, for as long as their bodies needed it, it would taste wonderful.
The power of simple inventions has a straightforward economic logic behind it. Simple things are cheap, and cheap things can be ubiquitous. We might call it the Toilet Paper Principle. If something is cheap enough to wipe your backside with, it’s cheap enough to change the world.
Mahalanabis never received the Nobel Prize for medicine. I doubt that worried him, but it should give the rest of us pause. If there is no room in our stories of success for the tin can, the menstrual pad and oral rehydration therapy, then we are missing something which matters.
Tim Harford’s new book is “How to Make the World Add Up”
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Tim Harford
