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.
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.
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.
Vsauce2 made a great video about him: https://youtu.be/okOfvMY5wOI
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/okOfvMY5wOI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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?
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
It is a pretty confident bet that mental illness is caused by mental illness not philosophy
