Nothing conserves like poverty

Sometimes neglect is good. In the city the rich folks live on the hill. In the country it's the poor folk. The big beef farmers and the corn barons have the flat land. Hill farmers are frequently too capital-lacking to make changes in the landscape. Or spray gallons of herbicides on to it. Nothing conserves like poverty. One summer I let the field go, instead of shuffling livestock on to it.

The peasant poet John Clare called plants 'green memorials'. By late June the field had sprouted flowers I'd forgotten existed, flowers such as knapweed and bugle, which were testament to an agricultural usage other than animal parking lot.

J. Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland (2014), 11-12

Americans would eventually get to share most of the advantages of Britain’s forced opening of China’s ports without any of the violence

As for the American traders at Canton, in some ways they were the war’s greatest beneficiaries, for they would eventually get to share most of the advantages of Britain’s forced opening of China’s ports without any of the violence or the lasting stain on their national character.

S. R. Platt, Imperial Twilight (2018), 416

As much as one-tenth of Britain’s national revenue derived from the trade at Canton

The [East India] Company’s income from the China trade was completely swamping its revenues from India: in the first decade of the 1800s, the imports from Canton provided two-thirds of the entire sales income of the East India Company in London. By the latter part of that decade the China portion of its trade was bringing in record profits while the India trade operated in some years at a net loss. The effect was, first, to create a huge increase in the government’s tax revenue from the China trade—to the point that by some estimates as much as one-tenth of Britain’s national revenue derived from the trade at Canton. By corollary, the growing reliance of the British government on its tax revenues from the Company’s tea also meant that the stability of affairs in Canton became a matter of serious national interest. Any interruption to the China trade could interfere with Britain’s ability to finance its war. 

S. R. Platt, Imperial Twilight (2018), 88-89

You may not want to spend too many years of your life here, but as you see it in the early 1830s, Canton hardly seems the kind of place to start a war.

The entire formal trade of Europe and America with China, the largest empire in existence, goes on here in a space of just twelve acres — less, some like to point out, than the footprint of one of the pyramids in Egypt. You may not want to spend too many years of your life here, but as you see it in the early 1830s, Canton hardly seems the kind of place to start a war. 

No event casts a longer shadow over China’s modern history than the Opium War. Sparked by an explosive series of events that took place in the Canton factory compound in 1839, the war would end in 1842 with China’s humiliating defeat and a treaty all but dictated by the British aggressors, setting a disastrous pattern for the century to come. Textbooks in China on “modern” history, as a rule, take the Opium War as their starting point, the moment when China left its traditional past behind and was dragged forcibly into the world of European imperialism. The war occupies that place not because it was so destructive; in fact, it was relatively small and contained. It caused none of the large-scale social dislocation that China’s major internal wars of the nineteenth century like the Taiping Rebellion did. It did not topple the ruling dynasty or even remotely threaten to do so. There weren’t even that many battles fought.

But the symbolic power of the Opium War if almost limitless. It has long stood as the point where China's weakness was laid bare before the world, the opening of a "Century of Humiliation".

S. R. Platt, Imperial Twilight (2018), xxi-xxii

But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly

To me, these were miracles enough. It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death. But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly. The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, “I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close.” I had not made the journey myself, and I had only seen the darkness reflected in the eyes of others. But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country—to see them so very close, clambering back. 

S. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), 400

In God we trust. All others must have data.

“The clinician, no matter how venerable, must accept the fact that experience, voluminous as it might be, cannot be employed as a sensitive indicator of scientific validity,” Fisher wrote in an article. He was willing to have faith in divine wisdom, but not in Halsted as divine wisdom. “In God we trust,” he brusquely told a journalist. “All others [must] have data.”

S. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), 200

New drugs appeared at an astonishing rate

New drugs appeared at an astonishing rate: by 1950, more than half the medicines in common medical use had been unknown merely a decade earlier. Perhaps even more significant than these miracle drugs, shifts in public health and hygiene also drastically altered the national physiognomy of illness. Typhoid fever, a contagion whose deadly swirl could decimate entire districts in weeks, melted away as the putrid water supplies of several cities were cleansed by massive municipal efforts. Even tuberculosis, the infamous “white plague” of the nineteenth century, was vanishing, its incidence plummeting by more than half between 1910 and 1940, largely due to better sanitation and public hygiene efforts. The life expectancy of Americans rose from forty-seven to sixty-eight in half a century, a greater leap in longevity than had been achieved over several previous centuries.

S. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), 22