Halloween, with its werewolves, ghosts, and other species of undead, rustles nearer. Should we live through it, comes the time—from Thanksgiving through Christmas—of colds and flu, as we travel about and catch things, then come home and stew in the closeness of the Season. In anticipation of all this, my throat is starting to feel a little scratchy. And, what with the swine flu (sorry, pigs, I meant "H1N1"!) crouching, ready to spring, and vampires trolling the neighborhood for candy, my thoughts naturally turn to garlic.
One year, tired of getting every cold my kids brought home from school, I thought I would try raw garlic as a preventative. As with the advocates of cold baths or business school, there were plenty of folks out there with more enthusiasm than evidence touting the advantages of raw garlic as an immune-system booster. And I thought, why not? It's a natural food, and a traditional folk remedy, so certainly worth a try. I started daily knocking back several cloves of the raw, chopped or crushed, in soup or a sandwich (never on cereal!), and guess what—no colds! From Thanksgiving until at least Valentines Day, for several years in a row, I took my daily garlic. As far as I could tell, I had escaped the bane of every parent of small children. (Oh, I may have had the occasional stuffed up nose overnight, but nothing more.)
Cynics pointed out that, given the well-known metabolic by-products of garlic, I was escaping disease by keeping everyone at a great distance from me by means of B.O. My family members, though, were either stupifyingly polite or simply honest when they said that no, I didn't smell any worse than usual...
However, I am a scientist—by temperment, anyway. One year I didn't do my garlic regimen, and waited for the worst. It never came. I was also cold-free that holiday season. Since then I have employed garlic only in the usual culinary ways, and my rate of catching cold is quite low anyway. So what gives?
Somewhere or other I read about prisoners who were forced to clear away the bodies of plague victims in Paris, perhaps during the first, most fatal eruption of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, perhaps during a later one. The story concerns garlic steeped in wine. Wine, of course, was the staple drink, since the water was bad. Anyway, these fellows, perhaps because of the infusions of garlic, could handle the dead and dying and not succumb themselves.
I suspect this story has a grain of truth. Prisoners were certainly dragooned into the terrifying work of clearing bodies. But did garlic save them? Well, look at it this way: they were probably eating garlic and onions—the caviar of the poor—anyway, and some of them lived. (Even the BD did not kill everyone.) The story no doubt grew (perhaps much later, through an article in the Garlic Growers Association Newsletter) that it was the garlic—after all, they were alive, and they ate garlic! The dead, who might of been equally enthusiastic consumers of garlic, were not considered...
Ah, survivor bias. We forget all about the losers, and just look at the winners as if they had done something special to be winners, then go about trying to find that something, and finally mythologize its efficacy. In fact, by and large, that something is usually just luck. It is not that winners do nothing to achieve their success. Many work quite hard, and are loaded with ability. The unfortunate fact, though, is that the losers are often equally ambitious and talented. And where good outcomes are granted to only a few—rock music, politics, paradigm-busting scientific research, business, plague survival—merit, however broadly defined, gets you only so far. Luck makes the final call.
Is this all to say that you should not work hard in your chosen field, but rather just kick back and wait for luck to kick in? Not at all. As someone said: "Fortune favors the prepared mind." No, it is simply to recognize that luck often trumps merit, so the proper attitude toward your own success is humility, and that of others skepticism. (Whether you season that skepticism with envy is your call.) Furthermore, look askance at recipes for success: they might be elevating mere contingencies that simply happened to be around when Chance touched down.
Garlic was around. Did it give life, or merely bask in the success of those that chance favored? I myself have been an enthusistic embracer of the garlic myth, which these days is encased in the natural foods myth, which is itself part of a primitivist reaction to modern life. Whether the garlic kept the colds away during the years my kids were the most contagious, and my stopping it just coincided with their no longer being that way, or my immune system never really needed it, I don't know. But just in keeping the werewolves and vampires at bay, I think it was worth it.