Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to observe microbes. Semmelweis deserves immense credit for trying to convince people to wash their hands, but he didn’t observe microbes and believed in corpse particles. (⌐■_■)
Comment on They're everywhere!!!
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 months ago
His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, and they threw him in a mental institution. He was trying to get doctors to wash their hands in between handling corpses and doing surgery, and they got super offended about it.
rambling_lunatic@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 months ago
Yeah. I was telling a fib for comedic effect. Semmelweis is actually a lot more impressive, to me, because he was able to deduce that something important was going on and what the solution was, without having any idea what the mechanism might be, simply from observing and following the data. He didn't need to know the details to know it was a problem; he just trusted the evidence without needing to have a narrative built up in his head to attach it to.
Also, once he realized it was killing people, he wouldn't shut up about it until they literally had to kill him to make him stop. That puts him over the line from good scientist to hero, to me.
thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world 3 months ago
yeah, the idea didn’t take off until the previous generation of doctors died. it’s a fact that often both encourages and discourages me.
even doctors were too stubborn to accept they may have been wrong about something so important, no matter the evidence. however, even those that are so stubborn that they’ll take it to the grave will eventually be passed up by a new generation who has known of this idea since before they were born. at worst, this kind of stubbornnes is only likely to stall progress for 2 generations.
still, millions of people died because humans are stubborn.
subtext@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I’m hopeful this will be how we solve racism and intolerance… hopefully as enough people are brought up the right way, we will eventually move past the hatred in the world today.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 months ago
That is the TL;DR of Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It is almost universal that when a new way of looking at the world comes along, very few people are persuaded to adopt it on an individual level. The consensus view generally stays the same until enough scientists who grew up with the old model die, that the ones remaining are outnumbered by new scientists who grew up with the new model.
It is bleakly comic, and there is surely some sort of productive lesson there, but I don't know what it is.
NecroParagon@lemm.ee 3 months ago
“A gentleman’s hands could never be dirty!”
Kalkaline@leminal.space 3 months ago
He made them scrub with bleach water until he couldn’t smell corpse smell anymore.
Anticorp@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Wait. For real? They had so much bacteria on their hands that they smelled of the dead, and they were going right into surgery with live humans? Damn, surgery must have been a death sentence back then.
psud@aussie.zone 3 months ago
They were practicing surgery on cadavers between deliveries. Gotta keep your skills up during your stint in maternity