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How do you figure it was “clearly false”? Once his protocol was implemented, mortality rates from childbed fever plummeted. It turned out the reason so many peo
by sixstringtheory 7y ago
How do you figure it was “clearly false”? Once his protocol was implemented, mortality rates from childbed fever plummeted. It turned out the reason so many people had been dying from it was that obstetricians were performing pathological observations on mothers who had died from it and then gone straight to delivering babies without disinfecting in between. This is readily available info on his wikipedia but also recently appeared in an episode of 99PI which is where I learned about it. I’d be interested to see more information presenting an alternative history.
- tptacek 7y agoAntiseptic handwashing wasn't false. His theory for why it worked was; that theory was that "cadaveric particles" --- literally, corpse particles, and very specifically not a more general concept of microscopic infectious agents --- were to blame for ailments, and that chlorinated lime was the only way to get rid of them. Other doctors noted things like ailments in patients with no plausible contact with cadavers, to no avail: Semmelweis was insistent. Semmelweis is, to me, an interesting story about how it's not all that useful to be right if you're unable to persuade, and Semmelweis' difficulties with persuasion have little to do with his adversaries bloody-mindedness and much to do with his.