5 Horrible Diseases That Changed The World (For the Better)

Disease gets a bad rap these days, purely based on it having nearly killed off the entire species several times. But there is a silver lining in even the most murderous of dark clouds.

Ever since it got the celebrity cause endorsement by Jenny McCarthy, everyone has diagnosed their progeny with the disease. But self-diagnosing parents aside, autism is a real disease with some serious consequences. Autistic people generally fail to develop normal social skills, and can become obsessed with minor details or systems that non-autistic folks consider insignificant. While the diagnosis covers a wide spectrum of disabilities, autism robs sufferers and loved ones of social skills like empathy and engagement.

Occasionally, they will find themselves trapped in a bad movie with Bruce Willis.

It turns out that an inability to fully relate to other people or care what they're saying about you also is really, really helpful to a revolutionary thinker. So it should come as no surprise that many famous scientists have been retroactively diagnosed as autistic, including all stars Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. The unnatural ability to stay obsessively locked on a task and not get distracted by this "life" stuff let them, to quote one expert, "produce in one lifetime the work of three or four other people."

Modern technology continues to benefit from the fruit of the autism tree. Thorkill Sonne (who evidently earned his name by slaying the god of thunder) founded Specialisterne, an IT consulting firm that hires and trains autistics to do software engineering problem solving for companies like Cisco and Microsoft, after learning that his son was autistic. Customers have found the autistics hired by the firm were five to 10 times more precise than the average person.

We won't comment on the implications of these facts.

Despite how wise and noble a given king or queen may be, the further you go down most royal bloodlines the more you tend to start running into batshit craziness and terrible deformity. After countless decades of incest-tastic inbreeding, just about every single crowned head of Europe was a blood relative of the other, essentially making World War I the best episode of Family Feud ever witnessed.

Incest allows negative recessive traits to survive and accumulate down family lines, chief among them hemophilia and porphyria, which were more common than herpes among European royalty. Hemophilia is a disorder of the blood that makes clotting virtually impossible and can turn a scrape on the knee into a life-threatening condition. Hemophilia changed the course of Russian history when the son of Tsar Nicholas II was stricken with it, which led to the Tsar and his wife being so obsessed with having Rasputin cure the boy's illness, that their country fell into revolution around them and their entire family got shot to death by Bolsheviks.

"Stick with me guys, everything's going to be totally fine."

Porphyria is another rare inherited disorder that became terribly common among the hereditary leaders of the world. It causes a variety of symptoms, including depression, paranoia, anxiety and hallucinations. A whole hell of a lot of royals are suspected to have suffered from porphyria: Vlad the Impaler, Mary Queen of Scots, Nebuchadnezzar and even King George III, the British monarch best known for being the king who lost the Colonies.

He may have been crazier than a shithouse rat, but you can't deny the man had style.

His enemies called him "mad King George," and recent evidence makes it clear that they were totally right. The Royal Doctors prescribed George a healthy dose of arsenic to keep his lunacy in check, which predictably didn't work at all in any way.

Back then, having a beard was just as good as a Ph.D.

Several revolutions later and it's clear that if it weren't for certain diseases (and incest) we'd have a shitload more monarchies still in working order around the world, and the United States would likely still be a protectorate under British rule. Thanks, incest!

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a condition where individuals lack attentiveness and impulse control. While many parents treat it as a wonder disease that absolves them of responsibility for their brat throwing temper tantrums in public or screeching on airplanes, in real cases it can hamper childhood development.

No, I didn't want to hear the movie. Thank you.

As it turns out, ADHD might actually be beneficial to the human species. Experts have found links between ADHD and creativity. According to Professor Michael Fitzgerald, "The same genes that are involved in ADHD can also be associated with risk-taking behavior. While these urges can be problematic or even self-destructive - occasionally leading people into delinquency, addiction or crime - they can also lead to earth-shattering breakthroughs in the fields of the art, science and exploration."

Fitzgerald has found signs of ADHD in such greats as author Mark Twain, inventor Thomas Edison, explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and artist Pablo Picasso. Remember, ADHD doesn't mean they're unable to pay attention to anything, it means they're unable to focus on things that don't stimulate them--once they find something, look out.

One theory says what we're calling ADHD is simply the positive genetic traits left over from the hunter/gatherer days. These are the people who would be bored to death by the quiet, complex task of farming, but thrived when given the frantic task of tracking and stabbing a wild boar. Hyperactivity and impulsiveness may get you fired if you're trying to work quietly in a cubicle, but will save your life if you're a nomad competing with other hunters for gazelles.

Unfortunately, the modern practice of drugging the tits off of kids with ADHD symptoms could actually be stifling future geniuses simply because they're bored to death by standardized education. For example, Kurt Cobain was doped up on Ritalin as a child because he couldn't do shit with a math book, but once he had a guitar in his hands he created one of the biggest rock bands in history. So really, Ritalin was the worst thing anyone could have given him.

OK, second worst.