I love Paul Ewald.
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I love Paul Ewald.
"My resolution of the problem had been delayed because I jumped to the wrong conclusion about its cause.
Had I thought more broadly about possible causes, I could have resolved the matter much more quickly.
On the bright side, it did not take me decades to figure out that my original line of thinking was leading me down the wrong path; and thousands of people did not die as a result of my misguided reasoning.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for medicine...."
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Jonathan Mesiano-Crookstonreplied to Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston last edited by
"... Thousands suffered and died because antibiotic treatment of peptic ulcers was generally recognized in 1995 instead of 1955. Thousands more probably suffered and died over a similar period because cervical cancer was treated as bad luck rather than a preventable sexually transmitted disease. ..."
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Jonathan Mesiano-Crookstonreplied to Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston last edited by
" ... It would be gratifying if we could be confident that these oversights were a thing of the past, that lessons had been learned and the health sciences now objectively consider and present the spectrum of feasible explanations for the cause and control of diseases.
But the record does not support this optimistic view, not when we assess the last two centuries of medical progress ... "
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Jonathan Mesiano-Crookstonreplied to Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston last edited by
From his book Plague Time, which has a Wikipedia entry here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Time%3A_The_New_Germ_Theory_of_Disease
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Jonathan Mesiano-Crookstonreplied to Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston last edited by
Good summary of the context in which handwashing arose
"In the early 1850s the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was perplexed by the fact that one out of eight healthy mothers-to-be who were admitted to the University of Vienna hospital to deliver babies were leaving in caskets. The “childbed fever” that killed the mothers shortly after delivery was characterized by sepsis, which in the mid-nineteenth century meant an invasion of the blood by rotten or putrid material. ..."
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Jonathan Mesiano-Crookstonreplied to Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston last edited by
... Today it means disease resulting from the presence of microbes or their toxins in the blood, a common consequence of hospital-acquired infections.
Semmelweis’s concern turned to horror when he began to understand the reasons for the hospital’s alarming statistics. He noticed that the women were dying from the same disease that physicians and medical students had been studying in the morgue in between giving pelvic ...
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Jonathan Mesiano-Crookstonreplied to Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston last edited by
... exams. More important, he noticed that the women who received those pelvic exams were more likely to fall ill than those who did not. He concluded, decades before Pasteur and Koch established the germ theory of disease, that the doctors and medical students were inadvertently killing the mothers-to-be by transmitting some invisible agent of disease during the prenatal exams. ...