If you could cure (insert Historical Person) ????

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There was a short story by Larry Niven in which a man invented a time machine, but didn't have the funding needed to finish it; he got the funds he needed from retired US Senator William Proxmire, with the understanding that when it was finished, Proxmire would be allowed to use it for a humanitarian purpose. Proxmire went to 1920, and the deck of the USS Roper, where he injected Lt. Robert Heinlein with antibiotics, enabling him to avoid tuberculosis. (In the real world, Proxmire always seemed to regard science in general, and the space program in particular, as a waste of money that could have been devoted to his precious milk price supports; a large number of people at NASA went into the space sciences after being inspired by Heinlein's SF in their youth.)

Proxmire returned to a world with a series of solar-power satellites, two lunar bases, and an Orion-drive craft bound for Mars a-building in Earth orbit. SF had, as Proxmire surmised, died out in the '50s, with no Heinlein (writing under four different names) to keep it going - but had been rediscovered, and resurrected as a branch of Fine Literature, in the '60s. The Soviets were sending cosmonauts along on the Mars trip, having paid with their share of the nukes the drive needed; however, they had no rockets of their own. Admiral Heinlein wouldn't let them.

Point being, curing someone of something might produce some rather unexpected results. If Kurt Cobain hadn't devoted his talents to music, what might he have turned them to? If George III had been given antipsychotics, how might the 18th century have changed? If someone had cured Adolf Hitler's syphilis, what would have become of post-WWI Germany?

Good point, DeaconBlues. I once read a what-if regarding Hitler. What if someone went back in time to persuade young Adolf in WWI that jews are really nice people and deserve to co-exist with everybody else in society. (Bizarrely, it was a jew who recommended Adolf for bravery.) But everything else went ahead the same. No jewish death camps, no jewish ghettoes. But Einstein and all the jewish Germans who created the Manhattan Project got to stay in Germany. They never had reason to leave. Which could mean Stalingrad a radioactive ruin?

I guess when the time machine gets invented we will have these dilemmas, like in back to the future.

That was a great movie

I have preminated the future a couple of times, but reaching backward seems utterly bizarre