There was Semmelweis in the right place at the right time?

Balázs, Péter (2015) There was Semmelweis in the right place at the right time? KALEIDOSCOPE: MŰVELŐDÉS- TUDOMÁNY- ÉS ORVOSTÖRTÉNETI FOLYÓIRAT, 6 (11). pp. 169-172. ISSN 2062-2597

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Abstract

By turning around the classic adage (in the wrong place at the wrong time) we can raise a reasonable question whether Ignaz Philip Semmelweis (1818-1865) was really deprived of the situation as indicated by both terms of the title. The proper answer should in turn explain why his discovery waited nearly half century for the well-deserved recognition. One of Semmelweis’s mishaps was – while grinding between the millstones of the applied and theoretic medicine – the expectance of the academic world to provide reliable scientific evidence for his thoroughly practical solution. Independent of this pressure, very simple practical solutions may also have an immediate and resounding success, if they calm down general and near to explosion social problems. However, Semmelweis had a great disadvantage in this regard by the extremely marginal social status of pregnant women to be delivered in the contemporary obstetrical wards. This was a significant backlash for the obstetrics allowing pseudoscientific considerations about the quality of corrupt air and miasmas flying around instead of saving the life of mothers deceased in puerperal fever. It was a basic mistake when the history of medicine manufactured a straight lineage of events as a justification for Semmelweis’s posthumous canonisation starting from microbiological discoveries of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and ending up in Joseph Lister’s (1827-1912) success in caring for compound fractures. Nevertheless, Pasteur proved inevitably that Semmelweis was right not only in practical, but also scientific terms. On the other hand, Lister's results demonstrated only how Semmelweis’s discovery might have succeeded if he had had to meet similar social expectations like those of the English industrial revolution. However, there was a contemporary and resounding success story in the era of Semmelweis, which answers exactly all positive and negative turns of his endeavours. This comparative story will be demonstrated in this presentation with due respect to Semmelweis while arranging all turns objectively of the past events.

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