The fucked up part is that barely a decade after his death - thanks to the efforts of Louis Pasteur - Semmelweis's work went from so controversial they condemned him to his death, to becoming the basis for the field of aseptics
Never suggest common sense to people who are raised in ignorance. Too much of a new idea will always be a huge threat to them, though nobody knows why.
It wasn't common sense at the time. Germ theory wouldn't exist for another 20 years after Semmelweis's discovery. His idea of "corpse particles that might turn a living person into a corpse after contact" seemed superstitious and crazy at the time. It was only after germ theory that we learned that these "corpse particles" were in fact germs.
I know I remember seeing a documentary about all this and how surgeons who frequently did autopsies at that time would often cut themselves, develop a fever and die from septic shock, never having learned that they maybe should wash their hands after playing with dead tissue. Germ theory wasn't even a theory then, because people didn't have any idea there could be such a thing as germs.
It makes me wonder what would people in the Renaissance or middle ages say, if we were to travel back in time and talk about dinosaurs. I'm sure they'd lock us up as mentally ill. How could there ever have been such a thing as gigantic mega-lizards walking around on earth!
From the micro to the macroscopic it's funny how we humans always have to learn things very slowly and only after making many incorrect assumptions.
IMO the common sense part isn't "oh right of course those are germs", but following the observation that points to some correlation. They don't have to know or understand the root cause to at least consider (or accept) that something is wrong.
If Semmelweis' s theories were correct, it would have meant that many deaths of their patients would have been easily avoidable. So those other doctors could either ridicule the theory and continue living + practicing in ignorance, or accept the theory and also accept that they had (unknowingly) caused the deaths of many of their patients.
I'm not surprised that they chose the route of ridicule. I'm also not surprised that 20 or 30 years later, when the assistants of the old doctors had become the new generation of doctors, that the theory was then more easily accepted.
IT's the Dunning-Kruger effect - people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria. And they tend to only value the criteria that validate their own points of view. What we really lack is the eagerness to know all sides of an issue and take them into account.
Imagine if Jesus Christ himself was just a benevolent charlatan that tried to codify a good standard of conduct for all his followers (and was then sadly overinterpreted and used for the occasional hate-speech)
Semmelweis was also kind of an asshole and would camp out by hospital sinks and yell at staffers for not washing their hands. He had the right idea, but he also had a shit personality which definitely contributed to the "everyone hated him" thing.
It also wasn’t soap and water handwashing. He had them wash in chlorinated lime, which did turn out to be effective in killing germs but also wasn’t the most pleasant stuff to be constantly putting your hands in.
The doctors at the hospital where this happened were also doing autopsies and would often go directly from an autopsie to the delivery ward without washing their hands.
The midwives did not perform autopsies.
It was not that the midwives' hands were especially clean, it was that the Dr's hands were very contaminated.
I think once when this was posted they said doctors would see other patients and even perform autopsies then do surgeries with no hand washing between.
Like Nietschze;
I mean the official theory ist that he contracted syfilis as a young man and therefore later in his life ended up in an insane asylum; which of course was fathomable and apparently happend a lot in the end of the 19th century.
I for myself kinda choose to stick to the theory that he just couldn't take the world view he created for himself anymore and the ignorance of the vast majority, so that he also had something like a 'nervous breakdown' that landed him in such a place.
But well, I guess that's just trivia or the ramblings of another mad man.. 😜cheers