How would a person with modern knowledge of chemistry and medicine fare in Ancient times?
You were born in Rome, when the Roman Republic was still in power. Your father is an upper middle class merchant and you are (or will be) the sole inheritor of his wealth.
One day, a mysterious stranger comes to town and offers your father his services as a tutor. He possesses strange contraptions, has a thick accent and is altogether otherworldly. You convince your father to employ him and he begins to teach you chemistry and medicine at a level unimaginable by your society (all the way up to our modern understanding).
You study with him for 6 years and he teaches you all that he can.
What can you do with this new found knowledge given that you want to advance humanity as much as possible within your limited lifetime?
Suppose that he teaches you up to the level of a modern doctor (M.D or PhD) and that you are
- More or less benevolent (no megalomaniac tendencies)
- But not entirely selfless (a man's gotta eat!)
EDIT: I do know of the other question regarding the time-traveling average Joe going to Medieval Europe. My question is different in three ways:
- The character in question is not an "average Joe", he has sufficient familiarity with the customs and culture of his society and is relatively high up in it
- The time period is Ancient, rather than the Medieval/Dark Ages
- The knowledge conferred, is of a highly specific (Chemistry and Medicine) and advanced nature (M.D/PhD level) with sufficient thoroughness in the teaching to be beyond the realms of "average"
Seeing as many of the answers of that question deal with the stigma of being foreign (not speaking the language or knowing the customs) or just simple survival (given poor living conditions, and that the character has no wealth or status in that society) I think my question is different enough to merit consideration
In response to some of the answers, I feel I need to clarify things a bit:
- You are answering this question from the perspective of the native Roman (not the mysterious, possibly time-traveling, stranger). The mysterious tutor disappears as quickly as he arrives.
- 6 years may seem insufficient by today's standards of education, but keep in mind that these 6 years are not spent in a lecture hall listening to 1-3 hour lectures but on one-on-one tutoring sessions (6-8 hours/day) with a live-in tutor.
- Where tools are necessary to prove certain things (like microorganisms) that are also not to unwieldy (simple light microscope is easy enough to carry, TEM is not), assume the tutor had one but that the Roman does not.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/13748. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
Your biggest problem by far here is going to be getting other people to believe you.
I'm assuming this mystical tutor is from the future? Given that, surely he must know that there will be problems getting society to believe what they're told. However, we've already done solutions for that on this site: see How do you prove you're from the future?
Once you've got everyone believing what you tell them, you also need to be able to keep that belief: if everything you spout is complete nonsense and the principles don't work when tested, you'll pretty quickly get executed. This is Ancient Rome. The solution to this is to take it all slowly, much as the tutor should have done for you. Teach the basics first and prove that they work. Then move on to other more complicated things that rely on the basics.
As for what the greatest benefit to society would be, it's a mixed blessing. All this knowledge could easily bring back penicillin, agricultural success, good housing, food security - and overpopulation. Instead of the global population exploding in the 1800's around the Industrial era, it'll explode in the new industrial age: what we call Ancient Rome.
What that does to us, today, is unknowable. Essentially, our current situation is brought forward so it happens in c.100 AD instead of 2015 AD, giving us another 1900 years before we get to today. Scientists are predicting, as always, several different outcomes of overpopulation:
- The Earth becomes wildly overpopulated, food is scarce, people die, and the population drops (then the scenario repeats)
- We start implementing strict 2-child or even 1-child laws. This stops or reverses growth - for every couple, you need 2 children to sustain the population.
- ???
There are plenty of people making plenty of predictions, and nobody knows who's right.
Summary: it brings 2015 to the Romans. Great for them, perhaps not so great for us.
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We have a lot of foundations that we kind of take for granted. There is kind of an expectation that once someone enters med school they have some basic understanding in anatomy, biology, math, medical theory, etc.
You can do on the job training, but going from apprentice to master takes a really long time.
Is this from the point of view of the time traveler, or the student?
Since he's a time traveler, it seems like he could skip around a bit to build the foundations.
Travel to X and teach a few nobles basic math and maybe a new number system. (the Romans had addition and subtraction (clumsy because of the numerals), but not multiplication and division)
Travel to X+10 and teach advanced math and germ theory.
X+20 and share the discovery of algebra, calculus, and antibiotics.
X+30: engineering, materials, and basic chemistry.
He'd be a something of a legend, arriving in town from who knows where, taking a few select students and imparting knowledge for a few years, and then disappearing again.
The knowledge would spread during his jumps, and people would build on it themselves, so that each time he'd have a higher place to start from.
You've heard the phrase, we stand on the shoulders of giants? Well, those giants are standing on the shoulders of other giants, who are in turn standing on others, and so on. The traveler would have to jump start it a bit to be really effective.
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