The other evening, I looked across the dinner table to my wife and said, "Appendicitis."  She said, "What?"  I said, "Appendicitis – nobody has appendicitis anymore.  It used to be that, at least once a month, somebody I knew was having an appendix taken out.  Don't they take out appendixes anymore?"  "Appendices," she said.  "Whatever," I said.

When the nest is empty and there are just two of you, I guess you do about anything to start a conversation, but this one did lead to some interesting speculation.  Gout, for example – doesn't anyone get gout anymore?  The last time I met a person with gout was back in the '60s, and even then I thought he was faking it.  And scurvy and rickets are so far out that I've never met anyone with either.

And what about croup?  Nobody has croup these days.  People used to get it all the time.  I gathered then that it was some kind of generic throat ailment that made people sort of go "c-rrr-ooo-p" when they coughed.  I've heard people doing that lately, but I think it's cigarettes, not croup.

We used to get “the grip” (more accurately spelled “grippe”) too.  I guess it has been replaced by “flu,” which is what it was – a form of influenza.  Nobody today talks about getting a “grippe shot,” but when I was a kid, people in my family were often coming down with the grippe.

We don’t hear much about mumps, measles, and chicken pox either, possibly because everyone gets inoculated against them.  When I was growing up, kids were often quarantined with the mumps, measles, or chicken pox.  The only way to become inoculated against these things was to get them.  After going through each of them once, one’s body became smart enough not to get it again.  You had to get mumps on both sides; if you didn’t, you got them again.

How about carbuncles?  Does anybody even know what they are?  What about lumbago?  I used to jokingly call the bandleader who played Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve “Guy Lumbago.” Now nobody has heard of him or the ailment on which my bad pun was based.  And how about fits?  Nobody has fits anymore.  Fits have fallen into oblivion along with the vapors.  Women used to get the vapors with alarming regularity, especially in Victorian novels.  Did women’s liberation wipe out the vapors?  And when was the last time somebody called in sick to work with ague or dyspepsia?  Even cooties are out.  Nobody is accused of having cooties anymore – bad breath, maybe, but not cooties.

Have you heard anything about the heebie-jeebies lately?  Perhaps you never heard about the heebie-jeebies, but I have.  My Dad claimed to have the heebie-jeebies a lot of the time, usually concurrently with my mother's giving him a hard time about something.  I began to think that he invented the word, so I looked it up.  Sorry, Dad, no claims to immortality – heebie-jeebies, defined as "jitters or willies" (nobody gets the willies or jitters anymore either), was invented by an American cartoonist named Billy DeBeck.

Thinking about my Dad and heebie-jeebies made me wonder about some of the cures that seemed to prevail in my youth.  Enemas – doesn't anybody get enemas anymore?  It's not exactly the kind of thing one likes to talk about, but I should think there would at least be whispers.  When I was a kid, a good ol' enema corrected any kind of stomach distress.  "Cleans you right out!" mother used to say.  (I always suspected that the threatened enema was a disciplinary device used to ensure that I wasn't faking illness so that I could stay home from school.)  About the only place you hear anyone talk about enemas these days is the hospital, where nurses administer countless enemas to show patients who’s in charge.

And cod liver oil.  Whatever happened to cod liver oil?  When the choice was between an enema and cod liver oil, the latter was the lesser of two evils.  But I haven't heard of either one lately.  What about smelling salts?  When was the last time somebody made a mad dash for the smelling salts?  I guess they went out of style with fits and vapors.  And Carter's Little Liver Pills?  Tincture of violet?  Mustard plasters?  For crying out loud, how can anyone get better without mustard plasters?

I think iodine has all but vanished as a treatment for abrasions – which is just as well because it stung like the devil.  Its less painful cousin, Mercurochrome, seems to have vanished too.  (It was the trade name for a form of merbromin, an antiseptic.)  Not long ago, during the bicentennial cleaning of our medicine cabinet, I tossed out the iodine and Mercurochrome; they had been replaced by an array of other antiseptics in aerosol cans.  It was a scary experience, for I was brought up to believe that without one of these any minor cut could result in my demise, perhaps within the hour.

It's a depressing topic, but I do wonder – have we really beaten these ailments into submission, or are they sneaking around under assumed names?  Is it really safe for me to live in a household devoid of iodine and cod liver oil?  I get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.