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And to think he could have been saved if those guards had washed their hands before beating him.
The fucked up part is that barely a decade after his death - thanks to the efforts of Louis Pasteur - Semmelweis's work went from so controversial they condemned him to his death, to becoming the basis for the field of aseptics
Florence Nightingale made some important public contributions here as well
I know that effect!
“That's the Florence Nightingale effect. It happens in hospitals when nurses fall in love with their patients.”
But what was George doing in that tree?
Never suggest common sense to people who are raised in ignorance. Too much of a new idea will always be a huge threat to them, though nobody knows why.
It wasn't common sense at the time. Germ theory wouldn't exist for another 20 years after Semmelweis's discovery. His idea of "corpse particles that might turn a living person into a corpse after contact" seemed superstitious and crazy at the time. It was only after germ theory that we learned that these "corpse particles" were in fact germs.
I know I remember seeing a documentary about all this and how surgeons who frequently did autopsies at that time would often cut themselves, develop a fever and die from septic shock, never having learned that they maybe should wash their hands after playing with dead tissue. Germ theory wasn't even a theory then, because people didn't have any idea there could be such a thing as germs.
It makes me wonder what would people in the Renaissance or middle ages say, if we were to travel back in time and talk about dinosaurs. I'm sure they'd lock us up as mentally ill. How could there ever have been such a thing as gigantic mega-lizards walking around on earth!
From the micro to the macroscopic it's funny how we humans always have to learn things very slowly and only after making many incorrect assumptions.
I'm sure our assumptions about climate will work out fine though
I'm sure of that too. It's 76 today in the middle of December, where in past years it's usually been 30. - what could be weird about that? My conclusion from all this earth getting warmer nonsense is, people should ignore it and learn to live with less clothes on.
Maybe they will, maybe they won't. All we know is that the climate is changing and we appear to be causing it as the average global temperature reversed and began increasing during what would normally be a cooling period. We also believe that we're the ones causing it because the increase in temperature correlates with the increase in CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases emitted. Now, of course correlation isn't causation, but because gases like CO2 are known to have a warming effect due to their ability to trap heat, it makes sense to believe that these gases would contribute to a hotter climate.
It's entirely possible that, in hindsight, we'll find that we were panicking over nothing, and that the earth fixes itself or that this is somehow normal. However, that's a hell of a gamble considering this is our only home in the cosmos. Do you really want to take that gamble?
If we only ever act on things we think we got 100% nailed down, we will either be as ignorant as these fools who locked Semmelweis away or we will stop doing anything at all, because realistically there is always a chance we got some seemingly basic understanding wrong.
The only intelligent thing is to work with a good mix of "what you know" paired with a sane amount of "critical thinking" and an assessment of potentially involved risks.
Covid was also an example (at least here in Germany). People fought against the invonvenience of having to wear masks or stay inside (or get vaccinated) because (as they said) we don't know for certain how dangerous the illness really is and/or how effectice these measures are.
For me the calculation was simple: doing these measures and being wrong has far far less fatal consequences than being wrong and not doing these measures.
IMO the common sense part isn't "oh right of course those are germs", but following the observation that points to some correlation. They don't have to know or understand the root cause to at least consider (or accept) that something is wrong.
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If Semmelweis' s theories were correct, it would have meant that many deaths of their patients would have been easily avoidable. So those other doctors could either ridicule the theory and continue living + practicing in ignorance, or accept the theory and also accept that they had (unknowingly) caused the deaths of many of their patients.
I'm not surprised that they chose the route of ridicule. I'm also not surprised that 20 or 30 years later, when the assistants of the old doctors had become the new generation of doctors, that the theory was then more easily accepted.
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Dude just needed a better PR team.
“By the lords blessing washing your hands in holy water and soap allows Christ to deliver the baby”
People would’ve seen the decrease in mortality and he could’ve gotten a selfie with the pope.
But then he'd given The Imaginary Man undeserved credit, and who knows where medicine would be today? so I think it was all for the best
Yeaaa religion set humanity back far enough as is, we need to attribute as little as possible to it
Imagine if Jesus Christ himself was just a benevolent charlatan that tried to codify a good standard of conduct for all his followers (and was then sadly overinterpreted and used for the occasional hate-speech)
Please continue
Semmelweis was also kind of an asshole and would camp out by hospital sinks and yell at staffers for not washing their hands. He had the right idea, but he also had a shit personality which definitely contributed to the "everyone hated him" thing.
It also wasn’t soap and water handwashing. He had them wash in chlorinated lime, which did turn out to be effective in killing germs but also wasn’t the most pleasant stuff to be constantly putting your hands in.
What I'm wondering is why the midwives for some reason had cleaner hands hand the male doctors?
The doctors at the hospital where this happened were also doing autopsies and would often go directly from an autopsie to the delivery ward without washing their hands.
The midwives did not perform autopsies.
It was not that the midwives' hands were especially clean, it was that the Dr's hands were very contaminated.
I think once when this was posted they said doctors would see other patients and even perform autopsies then do surgeries with no hand washing between.
They weren't dealing with other sick people I imagine. Also I bet they tended spend more time with each patient since they only did one specialist task.
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Vsauce2 made a great video about him: https://youtu.be/okOfvMY5wOI
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I can't wait to see what future generations will remark "I can't believe they lived in a world without that knowledge" about our time.
Plastic
Is this real and accurate?
Title gore...
Not really, they just forgot a word. Should be "what do you mean..."
"What do you mean things are so small that we can't see them with the human eye?"
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Like Nietschze; I mean the official theory ist that he contracted syfilis as a young man and therefore later in his life ended up in an insane asylum; which of course was fathomable and apparently happend a lot in the end of the 19th century. I for myself kinda choose to stick to the theory that he just couldn't take the world view he created for himself anymore and the ignorance of the vast majority, so that he also had something like a 'nervous breakdown' that landed him in such a place. But well, I guess that's just trivia or the ramblings of another mad man.. 😜cheers
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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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