Fair enough, and that guy's work was pretty close (in time) to the "germ revolution." The accounting of scientific revolutions is that anomalous results start g

Fair enough, and that guy's work was pretty close (in time) to the "germ revolution." The accounting of scientific revolutions is that anomalous results start getting common enough that people get uncomfortable calling them noise or faulty methodology. I'm not an expert in the history of paradigms of disease, but these results coming out were almost certainly part of what chipped away faith in miasma theory and, if you will, created the unease required for revolution. Importantly, Semmelweis couldn't offer an explanation for why washing hands helped, which seems to have greatly hindered his credibility. I said you were offering a germ-theoretic perspective, because we do (and must do) the same thing: How else should we separate the spurious correlations from the important ones? How do we separate superstition from good practice? How do we tell the crackpots from the creative? If we suspend the germ theory, what if there was something else going on at the hospital, and hand-washing was just something this guy noticed and latched on to? Then you'd be giving people the wrong advice---which is, after all, one of many reasons that correlation is not causation.