Generally I don't think feel-good stories belong in newspapers. The point of a newspaper is to convey the news, not make you feel good. But this feel-good story is an important counterpoint to the ghastly Covid-19 news. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/08/06/pregnant-covid-19-twins/?arc404=true

Covid-19 has been a devastating setback not only to global public health, but to my sense, maybe to everyone's, that medicine keeps getting better and better, and we're basically-- slowly but surely--conquering disease.

This story shows the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is that despite Covid, this is true. Look at all the things that happened. In vitro fertilization. There was no such thing when I was born. I remember the headlines (I was about ten) when the first baby was born through IVF.

Nor was there such a thing as CPAP therapy. (It was invented by the Australian physician Colin Sullivan and first used in 1980.)

I just found an interesting bit of medical history. The first written record of a C-section in which both mother and child survived? 1500.

Caesareans were performed in the Roman era, as the name suggests. But Roman law under Caesar decreed that this be performed on women clearly fated for death--or dead. It was to save the child. The mother never survived.

Saving the mother's life, too, was assumed impossible. The first recorded C-section in the West that saved the life of both mother and child didn't take place until about 1815. It seems to have been performed by a woman, James Miranda Stuart Barry.

She was masquerading as a man--women weren't admitted to medical school--and serving as a physician to the British army.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)

Only in the 19th century do we see the advances that transformed surgery from a barbaric experiment to a revolution in human health--anesthesia and infection control.

1846, Mass General: William Morton uses diethyl ether while removing a tumor.

The use of anesthesia was promptly rejected in obstetrics on the grounds that women must sorrow to bring forth children in atonement for Eve's sin, a taboo extant until Queen Victoria was given chloroform during the birth of her children. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/cesarean/part2.html

But until the emergence of the germ theory of disease, appalling standards of hygiene ensured that C-sections remained lethal to the mother. They died of septicemia and peritonitis.

And they died in childbirth at appalling rates, whether or not a C-section was endeavored. The biggest killer was puerperal pyrexia--childbed fever--agonizing and by no means mercifully swift.

The greatest achievements of modern medicine have been severing the link between pregnancy and death and reducing the rate of infant mortality. This--along with vaccination--is why life expectancy soars in the C20th.

(People often think, when they read that life expectancy in the US in 1850 was about 40, that people commonly dropped dead at the age of 40. Not so. If you survived childbirth and infancy, your life expectancy was close to a modern one.)

But before these advances, a quarter of newborns died in the first year of life and half as children. And premature birth was a death sentence: At the turn of the twentieth century, a baby born before 38 weeks had no chance.

From the story as published, it seems not only that mother and babies are well, but that no one who participated in this dangerous--and heroic--procedure was infected. They don't say so explicitly, but they say nothing to the contrary, and it's perfectly plausible.

So yes, this story made me feel good. 2020 has been a massive setback for the world, and it will take a long time to recover. But the knowledge we've gained about medicine is permanent. And we'll have a lot more of it because of Covid-19.

In the long run, the trend is toward "better." If we can avoid nuclear war, or an even worse pandemic, or some other massive catastrophe, life will probably be a *lot* better for future generations.