I Told You So Scientists Who Were Ridiculed Exiled And Imprisoned For Being Right – Matt Kaplan

This was less than 1 percent.19 Back in Vienna, where the chlorine washing regimen that he had established was disregarded by management as ridiculous, fatalities from puerperal fever shot up to 19 percent.20 While the return of these preventable fatalities in Austria was a terrible thing, an even worse outcome was that everything Semmelweis had worked so hard to discover was vanishing from obstetrics discourse.

Yes, people like von Hebra, Skoda, and Kussmaul remembered his findings, but since they were not obstetricians, they were in no position to be implementing the methods or teaching them to others. Even the volunteer work that Semmelweis was putting into the Hungarian hospital was going nowhere. Like the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow, the management of the Rochus Hospital saw no point in students being on the premises.

The city authorities that were running things felt that the activities of teaching and healing were at odds with one another.21 This meant that Semmelweis had no students during his six years there. In July 1855, when he was eventually granted a paid position as professor of obstetrics at the University of Pest, he did have students, but he faced serious challenges.

Unlike in Vienna, where teaching was solely conducted in German, Hungarian universities taught courses in Latin, Hungarian, and German. Even Janos Balassa, who had spent his entire life in Hungary, and who was capable of teaching in all three of the languages, found it difficult to use the right technical terms in the various languages during his lectures on surgery.22 This would have been hard for Semmelweis too, but what really made things difficult was the educational diversity that he encountered in the students with whom he worked.

Unlike other departments at the University of Pest, a quirk of the obstetrics department meant that Semmelweis was not teaching many trainee doctors. Roughly 75 percent of his students were women who wanted to become midwives. Most of these women came from the poorest social classes in Hungary and had very little experience with learning in an academic environment.

Many were nearly illiterate.23 There were few students who were able to learn much of the material that Semmelweis was prepared to teach them about disease prevention, and there were even fewer who were in a position to transmit what they learned further afield. Exacerbating matters was the isolation that Hungary experienced. When the Medical Society of Pest-Buda eventually opened again, Semmelweis gave regular lectures. Unfortunately, the content of what he presented was only discussed locally, and notes from his talks never made it out of the country.

The same proved true for Medical Weekly, a small journal that he helped to found in 1857.

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Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillan .com/piracy. OceanofPDF.com In loving memory of Richard Cowen, who taught me that scientists are people too … and that some were not okay to be left alone with his cat. OceanofPDF.com Introduction I wasn’t fazed one bit as the tequila hit the table for the third time in an hour. You see, while I wore the name tag MATT KAPLAN, SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT AT THE ECONOMIST, I had once been a part of this tribe.

Long ago they welcomed me as one of their own. I had wandered with them in the desert, shared their meals, and labored alongside them under the beating sun to pluck bones from the earth. Yes, I had been a paleontologist. The tequila was there from day one. I had spent years staring at fossils at the University of California. My lab at Berkeley used tequila to make poor man’s margaritas with Minute Maid lemonade in the field. They may not sound like much, but after spending a day in the scorching heat, sifting through sediment for the teeth of rodents that died a million years ago, kicking back with one of these drinks under the stars was a great way to relax.

Unfortunately, as the shots were poured this time—in a noisy bar near the 72nd annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP)—nobody at my table was even remotely relaxed. I quietly removed my press pass and name tag to avoid reminding my present company that I was not, in fact, part of their tribe any longer. “She’ll ruin us,” hissed one of them as his hand clenched a shot glass.

Language too vile to publish here, referring to female genitalia, slipped off the tongue of another. “It is contrary to everything that we know,” stated another with a cold and calm precision that I found decidedly disturbing amid all the anger. While this fury made me feel as if I had traveled back in time to the days when evolutionary theory was being shouted down by the Church, this was 2012. Moreover, this wasn’t anger from the religious right toward a liberal scientist.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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