Kurt Vonnegut was a huge fan of this champion not only of science but of free speech. Semmelweiss was perhaps one of the greatest medical and public health pioneers you probably never heard of. His life encapsulates everything that seems part of life-saving progress: careful observation; forming a hypothesis; testing that hypothesis in a controlled way; refining the hypothesis; then repeating; then being dismissed as a trouble-making crank. Just as Darwin knew nothing of genes much less DNA when he inferred natural selection (he knew the product but not the mechanism), Semmelweiss knew nothing of germ theory when he found that hand washing after an autopsy prevented the transmission of puerpal fever, which remarkably wasnt even considered an infectious disease at the time. Sadly, like most progressives challenging the mumpsimus of his time, Semmelweiss was roundly condemned, his ideas rejected by a pre-scientific medical community that was not ready to embrace empiricism (and admit it was wrong and should change - out really wasnt until the early 1900s that medicine became empirical and started to test whether what it did worked). There are few memorials or monuments to Semmelweiss, perhaps because his ideas on hand-washing are so universally accepted they seem mundane and patently obvious, but hygiene has saved more lives by far than any medical intervention ever.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 13:00:42 +0000