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Semmelweiss. His radical idea of “surgeons ought to wash their hands” saw him widely ridiculed and reduced to poverty, and he died in an institution.
Semmelweis discovered that a particular type of infection was much less likely to occur when doctors washed their hands with chlorinated lime water between doing an autopsy and examining a patient. However he did not know why or how this worked, and did not discover microorganisms (which were already observed by Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek some ~180 years earlier).
Wasn’t he also kinda of a dick to people
If I knew something that everyone could do to dramatically reduce the risk of life threatening infections, and nobody listened to me, I’d be kind of a dick too.
I think it was the other way around nobody listened to him because he was a dick
Semmelweis didn’t discover microbes. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first observed microbes in feces using the first microscope (the Leeuvenhoek microscope), which he also invented.
And if you believe that, then you’ll believe anything… that is supported by hard evidence and deducted from those by sound logical principles.
“Pfffff. Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true. Facts schmacts.”
–Homer Simpson
Before Louis Pasteur’s disproving of spontaneous generation, most people believed that bacteria and putrefactive organisms like maggots etc. spontaneously poofed into existence, like a video game character spawning. Pasteur suggested that maggots came from flies laying their eggs on rotting meat etc, and that bacteria were everywhere and will multiply quickly under the right conditions. A lot of people at the time thought these were crackpot ideas.
What I love is that when Van Leeuwenhoek first saw microorganisms in his microscope he named them “animalcules”, as in animal + molecule. Isn’t that freakin cute?
In the Discworld books witches are much like local doctors. There’s a young witch that can’t convince a family to move the privy away from the garden, which is making them sick. She tries to explain there are tiny, tiny animals that are coming from the poop and that’s what’s making them ill. They smile politely and don’t change anything.
The old witch comes along and it explains that the problem is the goblins in the outhouse and to move it far away from the garden. They happily do so.
This episode of This Podcast Will Kill You actually goes into that: https://player.fm/series/series-2359894/ep-31-giardia-gerardia
There is also a transcript if you just want to read about it: https://thispodcastwillkillyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/TPWKY-Episode-31-Giardia.pdf
(Warning: they make an alcoholic beverage towards the beginning of each episode in case anyone is in recovery)
Wierd part is you can actually see it with a microscope. Anime Parallel world pharmacy made more sense then real life.
Wee beasties!
Hello, Maleficent!
Imagine this guy trying to explain this discovery to people who spend days reading and responding to articles trying to calculate how many angles can fit on the head of a pin.
The angles you can fit on a pin head depend entirely on the precision you’re using. Quite a few with nanoseconds of a degree. Not many with radians.
(You mistyped angels)
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There were a few steps in between. Miasma theory said bad air/smells caused disease, which tried to explain infections spreading person to person. You might wear a satchel of basically potpourri to protect from plague if you believed this one.
Another was the “body humors”, where disease was thought to be caused by imbalances of four basic fluid types in the body. If you believed this one, you might try to treat someone by draining a whole bunch of their blood. Y’know, while they’re already sick.
Got pretty close with the smell.
Wonder if marketing bacteria as tiny demons would have been better.
Reminds me of this work by Latour. It goes into the tremendous amount of oftentimes political labor that goes into the establishment of new scientific knowledge as paradigmatic:
There’s a part of Old Yeller dedicated to this. His uncle doesn’t believe in germs because germs aren’t in the Bible.
Horton Hears a Who if Horton was the one saying “Boil that dust speck! Boil that dust speck!”
