By Dr. Anthony Policastro
I often quote Santayana, who noted: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We often choose to ignore the mistakes of the past while choosing to make the same mistakes over again.
The history of medicine has examples where scientific discoveries were ignored, with results sometimes being deadly.
Ignaz Semmelweis was a 19th-century Hungarian obstetrician. At the time of his practice, there was a disease known as “childbed fever”. It was an infection that caused a fever in both mother and child. It was often fatal.
This was long before Pasteur established the germ theory of disease. Semmelweis found that by washing his hands with a chlorinated lime solution, the death rate in mothers decreased from 18 percent to two percent.
The usual process for physicians in those days was to begin their rounds at the hospital by visiting the morgue. Some of the patients they visited were those who died of childbed fever. They then washed their hands with soap and water. However, that process failed to kill the germs. The chlorinated solution did.
The other physicians found it outrageous that Semmelweis was suggesting that they were the cause of childbed fever. After all, they did wash their hands. They just used the wrong kind of soap.
So Semmelweis was ridiculed, had a nervous breakdown, and died in an asylum in 1865. In 1879, Louis Pasteur proved that hemolytic streptococcus was the cause of childbed fever. Semmelweis had been right all along.
Joseph Lister is now known as the Father of Antiseptic Surgery. In the same year that Semmelweis died, he discovered that soaking dressings in carbolic acid prevented infections in compound fractures (those protruding through the skin).
He formalized the soaking of surgical instruments and washing of hands in carbolic acid as well. He sprayed the air above the surgical field with carbolic acid. He did other things to keep areas sterile.
He too, was mocked. It was once again that individuals preferred continuing in unproven ways. It is not clear how much quicker Lister’s techniques would have been used more widely if the opposition had not been there. It took four years of seeing infection levels drop using his methods before they actually caught on.
Thus, both Semmelweis and Lister were right. However, the outcry from those around them resulted in continued unnecessary deaths.
Sometimes we do not learn from history. There are many individuals today questioning medical techniques that have been proven to be effective. Their reasoning is simply that they do not believe what has been scientifically proven. It is a good thing we do not always follow their mistaken gut reaction.
Santayana would be able to tell you that it is a pathway to ensure that the result is more unnecessary deaths.