Stargoat's Journal: The Time Traveller, Part 3

The other thing that Active Historians are recruited for is disease resistance. But not in the way you might think. By the late 20th century (the most targeted recruiting era), penicillin has been both invented and rendered useless by overuse, mostly on cattle. So imagine the chaos that would be created if someone went back to 1850 with a drug resistant strain of athlete's foot. Yeah, fungus, bacteria, whatever. The process of resistance is still the same. When recruiting, it's just easier to find someone with natural disease resistance than make a laundry list of questions: have you had an ear infection in the past two years? Have you ever had a yeast infection that was not immediately cured? Does amoxicillin work on you?

So anyway. This guy, err fellow, Phil. He had an assignment he just could not pass up. He also had the sniffles. Rather than pass up the chance to visit his hero Wolfgang Mozart, he just toughened up, took a bunch of Tylenol Cold and hopped back. We lost eight operas, over a dozen concertos, and a really funny joke involving a Cardinal, a goat, and Maria Theresa. Also, the common cold? "Immune to penicillin." Yeah, whatever.

I would like to that was the worst thing we ever did with diseases, but that's clearly not the case. All I have to say is this. If you're going to sleep with some random sailor, wear a condom. It's just plain common courtesy to the late 20th century. So uh, yeah, sorry about that whole Freddie Mercury thing. My bad. Well, that and Rent.