The great thing about historical fiction, like that presented in the Outlander books is that a reader needn’t worry about the issues that plague us in the modern day. It’s actually pretty fascinating in the Outlander books, because the primary female character starts in the first book as a nurse from World War II who accidentally goes back in time in Scotland, and ends up a few years before the Stewart rising in the Highlands. She later returns to the modern day and becomes a doctor. then, 20 years later she heads back in time to find her true love, who is also 20 years older. It’s very sweet, really.

And when she goes back to the 1760s or so, she does so with a lot of modern medical knowledge, much of which is somewhat useless. Sure, if you want to treat Mesothelioma with a bleeding by leeches or maybe a pill made of pulverized horse droppings and spider webs, yeah…there are shops for that, but a proper pharmacy…not so much.

One of my favorite passages in the fourth book is when the Doctor, Clair, is trying to grow penicillin. She leaves out dozens of slices of bread, hoping against hope that one of them with naturally develop the mold that we know as penicillin. Of course, her greatest barrier to success is neither circumstance nor bad luck. It is a combination of vermin (rats, mice, roaches and other pests) and her nephew eating her starchy ersatz petri dishes off the kitchen counter.