this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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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.
Edit: I AM LYING! Partly. Semmelweis discovered illnesses caused by bacteria, but he didn't understand that they were caused by microbes, or the mechanism at work. He just was able to piece enough of it together to test empirically that if the doctors washed their hands, then people didn't get sick in the same way that they did if the hands had corpse-goo on them. Linking him to specifically understanding that tiny little creatures were everywhere was a little bit misleading thing for me to do.
Also, they were usually delivering babies, not doing "surgery" in the modern sense of opening people up and poking around in them.
The rest of what I said is true.
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.
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.