• Th4tGuyII@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    The fucked up part is that barely a decade after his death - thanks to the efforts of Louis Pasteur - Semmelweis’s work went from so controversial they condemned him to his death, to becoming the basis for the field of aseptics

      • AtariDump@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I know that effect!

        “That’s the Florence Nightingale effect. It happens in hospitals when nurses fall in love with their patients.”

        But what was George doing in that tree?

  • CluckN@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Dude just needed a better PR team.

    “By the lords blessing washing your hands in holy water and soap allows Christ to deliver the baby”

    People would’ve seen the decrease in mortality and he could’ve gotten a selfie with the pope.

    • bratosch@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      But then he’d given The Imaginary Man undeserved credit, and who knows where medicine would be today? so I think it was all for the best

      • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Yeaaa religion set humanity back far enough as is, we need to attribute as little as possible to it

    • Katana314@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Imagine if Jesus Christ himself was just a benevolent charlatan that tried to codify a good standard of conduct for all his followers (and was then sadly overinterpreted and used for the occasional hate-speech)

  • DrMango@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Semmelweis was also kind of an asshole and would camp out by hospital sinks and yell at staffers for not washing their hands. He had the right idea, but he also had a shit personality which definitely contributed to the “everyone hated him” thing.

    • derf82@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It also wasn’t soap and water handwashing. He had them wash in chlorinated lime, which did turn out to be effective in killing germs but also wasn’t the most pleasant stuff to be constantly putting your hands in.

  • bratosch@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    What I’m wondering is why the midwives for some reason had cleaner hands hand the male doctors?

    • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      The doctors at the hospital where this happened were also doing autopsies and would often go directly from an autopsie to the delivery ward without washing their hands.

      The midwives did not perform autopsies.

      It was not that the midwives’ hands were especially clean, it was that the Dr’s hands were very contaminated.

    • Kage520@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I think once when this was posted they said doctors would see other patients and even perform autopsies then do surgeries with no hand washing between.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      They weren’t dealing with other sick people I imagine. Also I bet they tended spend more time with each patient since they only did one specialist task.

  • tygerprints@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    Never suggest common sense to people who are raised in ignorance. Too much of a new idea will always be a huge threat to them, though nobody knows why.

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      If Semmelweis’ s theories were correct, it would have meant that many deaths of their patients would have been easily avoidable. So those other doctors could either ridicule the theory and continue living + practicing in ignorance, or accept the theory and also accept that they had (unknowingly) caused the deaths of many of their patients.

      I’m not surprised that they chose the route of ridicule. I’m also not surprised that 20 or 30 years later, when the assistants of the old doctors had become the new generation of doctors, that the theory was then more easily accepted.

      • tygerprints@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        IT’s the Dunning-Kruger effect - people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria. And they tend to only value the criteria that validate their own points of view. What we really lack is the eagerness to know all sides of an issue and take them into account.

  • bartolomeo@suppo.fi
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    7 months ago

    I can’t wait to see what future generations will remark “I can’t believe they lived in a world without that knowledge” about our time.

  • progbob@feddit.de
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    7 months ago

    Like Nietschze; I mean the official theory ist that he contracted syfilis as a young man and therefore later in his life ended up in an insane asylum; which of course was fathomable and apparently happend a lot in the end of the 19th century. I for myself kinda choose to stick to the theory that he just couldn’t take the world view he created for himself anymore and the ignorance of the vast majority, so that he also had something like a ‘nervous breakdown’ that landed him in such a place. But well, I guess that’s just trivia or the ramblings of another mad man… 😜cheers

        • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          Give us your experimental designs to verify or falsify all the things you listed:

          Afterlife

          Reincarnation

          A creator of the universe

          Little people

          Spirits

          I personally believe none of it but show me how it can be proven using the scientific method.

            • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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              7 months ago

              Environments suggesting an afterlife may be encountered via certain meditation techniques.

              What is your control group for this?

              Does people not experiencing this while mediating prove it does not exist. (I have been practising meditation for 20 years and have no indication of this)

              Interviews with children who recall past lives suggests reincarnation.

              Do interviews with children who do not recall pass lives invalidate this?

              Something fitting description of a “creator of the universe” may be encountered via certain meditation techniques.

              What is your control group for this?

              Does people not experiencing this while mediating prove it does not exist. (I have been practising meditation for 20 years and have no indication of this)

              Little people. Hmm. You got me there. But the literature is filled with reports.

              Literature is filled with shit people made up, it proves nothing scientifically.

              And of course, these methods unavoidably esoteric and depthy.

              Exactly, none of what you wrote is based on the scientific method.

                • Zink@pawb.social
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                  7 months ago

                  Observation is not looking at something and drawing a conclusion. It is noticing something, looking into that something, and then designing a controlled environment to test your observations to see whether you observed correctly.

                  I can’t look at an apple for the first time and tell you whether or not it is ripe. I would first need to know what an apple should look like when it’s ripe based on what I find, and then make sure that an apple is ripe when it is in a certain condition.