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Here are three individuals side by side in one moment in time in the last decade of the twentieth century. It is taken on the path to Ndamana in Northeast Congo, then named Zaire.
For any practical purposes as far as the woman and her daughter are concerned, the one man pictured fell from another planet as an "Extraterrestrial" who will soon be taken up again by the spaceship that somehow diverted him here. He has had advantages and has seen things of which she has no imagination--and she, also, for him. Yet, as depicted in this portrait, they are contemporaries.
She is a person with obvious and untreated leprosy; note the traumatic absence of all digits on hands and feet, the nerve thickening and the patches of thickened anesthetic skin which were added to the foot drop and other observations confirmed at the time of this chance meeting in the jungle. She also had undiagnosed and untreated tuberculosis. She had a significant problem with hypothyroidism, if manifest by no other fact than that she is proudly showing off the surviving daughter of her ten pregnancies that went to term births. Her daughter is an obvious cretin, and survived, barely, when nine of her more severely affected siblings did not. But she has statuary, mental, and metabolic retardation, besides being deaf-mute.
This is the Golden Age of Medicine and Surgery, when we can transplant genes, replace failing organs with live or engineered artificial parts, diagnose things with immuno-reactive agents, and fix them with minimally invasive techniques in manipulating information and laser emissions--either directly or remotely. And here is another citizen of this planet meeting another, with such obvious abnormalities as untouched by any of these wonders as they would have been before medieval eras of plague columns and the "Tanzer Tot". There are centuries, or even millennia, between these two contemporaries.
When I had been touring through Pakistan at one time and looking over problems of contemporary health care practices there, I used to look up at each new individual I would confront and ask a question more significant than "what nationality are you?", "what language do you speak?", or, "what religion do you practice?": "What century are you living in?"
World-wide there are many gaps in health, in space and in time. The gap widens. For a further concern about this perspective, read "Mind the Gap." (coming soon)