Gongol.com Archives: July 2025
July 19, 2025
160 years ago this month, a doctor was lured under false pretenses into an insane asylum, where he was effectively kidnapped by guards. The doctor died less than a month later. Aside from the theatrical allure of the incident itself, what makes the story important is the identity of the doctor. ■ He was Ignaz Semmelweis, a name basically unknown to the public today. But in his own time, he was a loud, lonely, and vigorous voice for a wildly unpopular belief: That doctors should sanitize their hands between patient interactions. Semmelweis had conclusively and empirically established that antibacterial disinfection was a necessary tool for protecting the lives of patients -- and he had done so as early as 1847. ■ His problem was that he hadn't established a satisfying explanatory theory for his evidence, and doctors didn't want to believe that they were unintentionally killing their patients. It took the further work of people like Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur to ultimately change professional attitudes. ■ We should take the Semmelweis story seriously because it points to a frailty of thinking to which we are no more immune than the doctors of his time: People don't like to hear that their own choices are causing harm, even (and perhaps especially) harm to themselves, and many will retreat to bad practices that look popular rather than heed the evidence. ■ Yet the evidence ultimately prevails, and the bad choices are what continue to cause harm -- in Semmelweis's case, literally decades of totally needless deaths of thousands of mothers, only because the evidence was uncomfortable for the professionals to hear. In some places, his advice from 160 years ago still needs to be communicated to be believed. We should be alert to the risk that plenty of professionals -- and common people alike -- may be prone to persisting in similarly stupid and self-defeating behaviors today, just because we don't like to be told that we're causing our own troubles through bad choices.
