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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
