A Forgotten Benefactor

The other evening while reading Levitt and Dubner’s SuperFreakonomics, I came across the name of one of the true benefactor’s of mankind, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss. Never heard of the name? I never did either until I read the book. But, I am sure that you have heard of his seminal discovery. He was the physician who made childbirth much less risky by suggesting that physicians wash and disinfect their hands before delivering babies. Without him, many of us might not be around today.

What the good doctor did was to suggest that medical students and their professors should wash and disinfect their hands after dissecting corpses in the hospital morgue before going to the bedside of a patient in labor. Since Louis Pasteur had not yet promulgated the “germ theory” of disease, there was no theoretical explanation of why washing and disinfecting a caregiver’s hands to remove cadaverous tissue should lead to a decline in puerperal fever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

Dr. Semmelweiss’s discovery was rejected by most of the leaders of Obstetrics of his time. After his live saving discovery was published, his career was troubled, to say the least. Less than two decades later he died in a mental asylum, having been sent there because of deep depression, alcoholism and other psychiatric disorders. Did his professional rejection cause his decline? Possibly. But what is clear was that his profession was slow to accept his findings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

It is sad to think of how many lives were lost because the leaders of Medicine rejected his findings out of hand.

It is also very easy to think that in our modern day and age, such a rejection would not have occurred. However, would the findings of Dr. Semmelweiss be accepted today? I have my doubts.

According to great economists, Dr. McCloskey and Dr. Ziliak, in their seminal work, The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Errors Costs Us Jobs, Justice and Lives, the result of a research project is not able to be published in most scientific journals unless the findings are statistically significant. Dr. Semmelweiss’s research was only based upon his findings which compared the results in one hospital in Vienna. His data was probably too small to yield a statistically significant result. If Dr. Semmelweiss had tried to publish his findings today, they would have been rejected for a lack of statistical significance.

What we have here is a modern version of the old bane of mankind–narrow mindedness–clothed in the wrappings of applied mathematics. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Sad.