In 1913, Dr. Lea A. Riely was optimistic about the future. Tasked with imaging the technological and medical advances that would be achieved in the span of the next hundred years, the President of the anti-Tubercular League in Oklahoma City penned a letter outlining his “Utopian dream of a century later.” The letter, kept by the Oklahoma Historical Society and released as part of their Century Chest exhibit, made its way onto a thread in Reddit’s medical community today.

Turns out some of his predictions weren’t too far off.

“One-hundred and twenty-five years ago, Jenner, a young Englishman, developed and expounded the fact that English dairy maids with cow-pox did not develop smallpox, while everyone else did when exposed,” Riely wrote, explaining the exciting discovery that would lead to the development of vaccines. “It was a hard thing then to realize that such a thing then was or ever could be possible. Wright of London now comes forward with the opsonic theory, wherein the serum and white cells are able to combat the invading germs better by the injection of dead germs.”

Riely lived in the time when vaccine science was new—and was not yet fully utilized. He was excited about the promise vaccines held for eliminating disease.

“This line of treatment will be more in vogue in your day than ours,” he writes, “and the children of your time will have prophylactic doses of the bacteria of scarlet fever, tuberculosis, syphilis, measles, and pertussis, as the children of our day are vaccinated against variola.”

Today in the United States, children are routinely vaccinated. While there’s still no viable vaccine for syphilis or scarlet fever, both the measles and pertussis (otherwise known as whooping cough) have been nearly eliminated in the US and in many other developed nations, because of vaccines.

In recent years, growing numbers of parents have started to push back on science though, and are opting out of inoculating their kids. According to the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the communities with large gaps in vaccination coverage, while in the minority around the country, could cause these dangerous diseases to make a comeback. Riely wouldn’t be pleased.

But for the most part though, his imagined world where the drinking water was pure where sanitation in cities “will mean a most wonderful change in man’s expectancy” has come to fruition. Infant mortality, as he hoped, has plummeted and there is a dedicated Public Health agency responsible for ensuring the continued elimination of infectious diseases.

Riely may have had some good insights when it comes to developments in science and social infrastructure, but he was pretty far off with his beliefs on how human anatomy would change over the course of the century. He thought humans would be smaller in size—an average of about five-foot, six—but would have larger heads, from all the extra time we spent learning things:

“Your physical being will be less vigorous to compensate for the extra development of your intellect and the fact also that your hard work will be mostly accomplished by dexterous and almost human machinery which is bound to be developed in this century of time and development. Yours will be the master mind that will pull the lever or push the button for much that is arduous manual labor at present.”

He also thought government would play a much larger role in protecting health:

“The greatest advantage you will have over us is in the change brought about by government insurance which, when that occurs, means that all physicians will become government employees with plenary powers to regulate and impose severe penalty on all acts which violate the strict sanitary laws which are then in vogue.”

Whole lot of nope on that point.

In the end, Dr. Riely’s hopes for the future may not have been entirely fulfilled—but at least we have come a long way. For now, his final message from 1913 could stand as instruction for what we might aspire to accomplish in the next hundred years:

“We hope that our ideal both as to physician and people will be realized and that they will have risen by this century of research until nothing could be impossible for them to accomplish,” he writes. “May my ashes rest in peace among such a cultured people where peace and prosperity, friendship and love universally abounds.”