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Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

This article ponders why Semmelweis went insane. While it’s possible, likely perhaps, that medical issues were involved (injecting yourself with Syphilis is rarely a good idea), how would it feel to watch women, new mothers die every day before your eyes, while you know the solution, but the people around you refuse to believe you, and refuse to take action, basically out of pure pride and arrogance.

Imagine watching mother after mother die in front of you. Imagine knowing the solution. Imagine the people around you ignoring it. Surely that would be enough to drive any normal man insane, or to alcoholism, or some other escape from reality

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Semmelweis did not go insane.

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 Wikipedia article kind of suggests he was railroaded due to people not liking his ideas:

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

I wonder who are today's Semmelweis. Privacy advocats? Paper lobbyists? Climate activits?

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

Constant Anxiety Won't Save the World: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/constant-...

Indeed. Last year I resolved to only get upset about things I can change. The challenge now is to tell the difference.

To a degree the early people in the western countries who called for wearing masks. Ironically they were laughed at due to a cargo cult based on Semmelweis‘s insights.

> cargo cult based on Semmelweis‘s insights.

Uh, how so?

Climate activists? Really? While the causes of most climate activists are pretty valid and usually based on plenty of science, the comparison is absurd. Semmelweis was almost universally derided by all professional and public sectors for his findings. Most climate activism on the other hand is pretty much a default media-friendly, celebrity-friendly, widely socially and scientifically supported stance that has enormous popular appeal. I mean, you seriously think the two contexts are comparable? It's a disservice to what Semmelweis really had to deal with in his time.

Privacy advocates are a bit closer to the mark but though they have much less popular voice than climate activists, they're also widely listened to (even if few organizations do much to apply their advice).

I honestly have no idea what a paper lobbyist is.

Think of the climate people in the 80ies.

> paper lobbyist

one who wants to slow down datafication of all aspects of life. Both private and public. I took paper as a symbol.

Even in the 80's and we could go as far back as the 70's, climate activism was robustly supported by many sectors of society, media and popular culture. Not as much as it is today but far ahead of a doctor being literally destroyed and later killed through negligent detention for his views.

I've never heard of paper activism as an actual cause. Interesting, and definitely less known than the others it seems.

Indeed, the grim fate of Semmelweis is extreme. But think, for example, of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who fought Big Oil and was executed.

As for paper - I suspect that written letter communication leaves a much smaller footprint than sending emails and printing on demand. However, I have no evidence of this yet.

But https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ has something about the rebound effect exceeding the initial savings.

Pierre Kory: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/123865326

One example today relates to teaching (in college). Most instructors (~75%) predominantly lecture, even though hundreds of studies have shown that increases the failure rate of students by 55% on average compared to teaching with some active learning. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111 We're losing hundreds of thousands of STEM major students because of that alone, disproportionately students from underrepresented groups. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/12/6476

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