By John Ballard
We need a communication tool between a blogpost and a tweet.
This one-liner is too long to tweet, too short for a good blogpost and too good to miss. H/T Crof
Poor old Semmelweis went crazy trying to persuade his colleagues to discard their blood-caked aprons, and maybe even wash their hands, when they delivered babies. The colleagues were proud of their aprons as emblems of experience. They didn't see the point of washing their hands. Childbed fever? Dead mothers? That was just bad luck for the mothers.
It only cost him his best freind's life (fellow surgeon cut himself during an autopsy.) I do consider this a fine example of the failure of the "scientific" method. Semmelweis had been scientifically studying child-birth fever but didn't see the real cause until something unrelated happened in a different part of his hospital.
ReplyDeleteVonnegut wrote about Ignaz Semmelweis in "A Man Without A Country" and held him up as a personal hero. Kurt's version of the story was that Semmelweis was an obstetrician from Budapest who went to work in Vienna at a teaching hospital. He was horrified at the death rate and suggested the doctors wash their hands after dissecting corpses and before touching the women who were to give birth. He was reviled as an upstart and an outsider by the Austrian doctors who at first refused but later relented to his request, but only for the purpose of teaching the inferior upstart a lesson. They were wrong and the dying stopped. That fact didn't change the Austrians doctors low opinion of the Hungarian and for his trouble Ignaz Semmelweis was forced from his position at the hospital and from Vienna as well. It was in Hungary that after dissecting a corpse he stabbed himself in the hand on purpose to prove his point and died of blood poisoning as he knew he would. That's the Kurt Vonnegut version of this story. I'll stick with Kurt.
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