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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.
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 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).
Semmelweis didn’t discover microbes. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first observed microbes in feces using the first microscope (the Leeuvenhoek microscope), which he also invented.
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.
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
Horton Hears a Who if Horton was the one saying “Boil that dust speck! Boil that dust speck!”
There’s a part of Old Yeller dedicated to this. His uncle doesn’t believe in germs because germs aren’t in the Bible.
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:
