In 1850, Ignaz Semmelweis saved lives with three words: wash your hands (2015)

And how to no go insane and drown in Cassandra syndrome?

In 1865, János Balassa wrote a document referring Semmelweis to a mental institution. On July 30, Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra lured him, under the pretense of visiting one of Hebra's "new Institutes", to a Viennese insane asylum located in Lazarettgasse (Landes-Irren-Anstalt in der Lazarettgasse).[60] Semmelweis surmised what was happening and tried to leave. He was severely beaten by several guards, secured in a straitjacket, and confined to a darkened cell. Apart from the straitjacket, treatments at the mental institution included dousing with cold water and administering castor oil, a laxative. He died after two weeks, on August 13, 1865, aged 47, from a gangrenous wound, due to an infection on his right hand which might have been caused by the struggle. The autopsy gave the cause of death as pyemia—blood poisoning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

He was actually one of the fathers of evidence-based medicine by counting number of death in hospitals after child-birth.

He discovered that when women where treated by doctors MORE deaths occurred than when women where treated by nurses. The reason for this might have been that the doctors also dissected corpses at university and brought germs from this when examining women.

That was the problem of the message: He postulated that his peers, the noble doctors were directly responsible for a high number of deaths. This was a message nobody wanted to hear.

Since he became more and more outspoken and angry that nobody believed him, they shut him up by luring him into an asylum where he died.

Later his methods were approved, since the young students had no bad conscience about having indirectly killed women in their career.

The true symbol of a reputable obstetrician was to have working hands. This meant touching exposed tissue while being covered with...necrotic tissue.

Probably great for the population and likely to increase Earth’s carrying capacity of humans, as is the case with most technological progress (hand washing, plumbing, agricultural techniques increasing food production per hectare, micronutrient fortification). We become dependent on these things and as long as they stick around as reliable infrastructure then we are good

It is important to keep in mind, however, that exposing oneself to pathogens from other humans is distinct from exposing oneself to various neutral microorganisms from the environment that help diversify your micro biome and generally make your immune system stronger. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” does not apply to oneself and Ebola or HIV or even malaria in a very practical sense. Perhaps most relatable to Hacker News folks is that each infection in one’s body offers a nonzero chance of lowering one’s IQ. That should suffice as reason to avoid disease

Edit: [0] I get sick a lot more easily than they do, and uh, it took me 9 months to recover from Covid (long Covid)

But most hand soap is only antibacterial insomuch as the soap chemically binds to them and the water washes it away.

Hopefully we go back to letting things be and not requiring sterile public spaces.

Alternatively, be nice to people, making it easier for them to like your ideas.

Semmelweiss didn't know what it was that killed people. He had some results that suggested a correlation between hand washing and mothers surviving. But he couldn't explain what the mechanism was. It was quite easy for the scientific establishment to dismiss his results as a peculiarity of the ward he was working on.

I don't think using a translation of what he actually said is dumbing it down, it just makes it more accessible for readers of English.