Had I been an eighteenth-century venture capitalist, a wealthy and bewigged cynic, I would most certainly have funded inventions promising to prevent premature burial. The irrational horror of vivisepulture, after all, kept many Georgian and early Victorian paranoids awake all night. Nobody wanted to wake up in a coffin, their screams for help unheard by those passing by six feet above.
So there was easy cash to be made by smart investors willing and able to exploit the mania of the age. I can imagine myself in the counting house, ruffle-sleeve deep in golden coins, toasting the fearful suckers with a yard of finest ale and another slice of squirrel pie.
But knowing me, of course, it's more likely I'd have been the frock-coated nineteenth-century chump actually buying the anti-vivisepulture apparatus, rather than its grinning salesman with silver-buckled shoes.
This weekend, for example, I am spending a few sun-soaked summer days in a log cabin beside the lake. Bliss, surely. But all I can think about is flesh-eating bacteria in the water.
Flesh-eating bacteria is in the news a lot these days. I believe the experts call it Necrotizing fasciitis, which sounds as ghoulish irresistible as vivisepulture. Yet have I plowed my life's savings into marketing a highly profitable anti-necrotizing fasciitis ointment?
No, I haven't. But I'd definitely buy a tube if such a product were for sale in my local pharmacy, especially if it was combined with insect repellant into powerful, two-for-one, all-day protection from ravenous microbes and blood-thirsty bugs.
I write this after grudgingly spending $120.00 for prescribed "heart-health" medication, thinking that it's about time I included AstraZeneca, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline in my 401(k) portfolio. If I was so invested at least I'd feel like I was buying my own health instead of just renting.
Meanwhile, I sit up at night worrying that those blood-pressure pills and beta-blockers might slow my heart rate so much that my top-hatted, side-whiskered doctor might think I'm really dead ...
