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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.
"A gentleman's hands could never be dirty!"
He made them scrub with bleach water until he couldn't smell corpse smell anymore.
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.
Not just surgery, but they were also working in labor and delivery, so they were getting all that on mothers and their newborn babies.
They were practicing surgery on cadavers between deliveries. Gotta keep your skills up during your stint in maternity
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. (⌐■_■)
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.
Not arguing with that, but clearly people seem to believe you and think he discovered microbes, which he didn't. The truth is more impressive anyways, no?
I edited it to add a correction. I shouldn't fib for the sake of making a more entertaining link to the posting, maybe.
Cheers, comrade.
Maybe strikethrough the first part where you credit semmelweis with the discovery. And no, a convenient lie is never better than a complicated truth. It may seem harmless to you but you've just created misinformation and disseminated it to the public.
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.
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.