A calling for Scientific Humility: the Story of Dr. Semmelweis

It could be said that humility is understanding that what you don’t know might be more important than what you do know. One of the biggest takeaways from school for me was that, while we know a whole lot about the human body and how it interacts with the world, there’s still so much we don’t understand. The pridefulness of thinking you know everything leads to a fundamental lack of curiosity, narrow vision, as well as an inability to observe and listen.  Ideally, none of those qualities would be used to describe a doctor or scientist, but that’s exactly what we see over and over throughout history and we’d be fools to think that it isn’t true today. 

I’m not writing this to mitigate the advancements we’ve made in science and medicine. We’ve figured out some amazing discoveries. I am however suggesting that there will be a time in the future where our descendents will look back on this time and consider our science barbaric and crude even. If we were truly as knowledgeable as some people in the media talk like we are we wouldn’t have to deal with cancer, heart disease, depression, dimenzia and obesity, let alone infectious disease. So it surprises me when I hear talk of definitive solutions to modern problems like global viral pandemics. The truth is, we don’t have answers. We have questions, but are we even asking the right questions? Questions lead to experiments and simulations, which can become models and theories,  but these things need to be tested over time. And we might not even know if we’re asking the wrong questions until after numerous people have suffered or died due to erroneous presumptions. 

Historically, some of the great discoveries came from minds that thought way outside of the box, often leading to ridicule and even persecution. The current chastsisement of doctors and scientists with alternative or contrarian ideas might scare creative thinkers from sticking out their necks for fear of being publically scorned as “stupid” or “dangerous.” But we need people to think differently in order to ask better questions. One of the best examples of this scenario is the tragic story of a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis. 

In the mid 19th century, Europe was experiencing a horrible epidemic known as childbed fever. In its peak, it was killing as much as 16% of the women giving birth in hospitals. Can you imagine going into labor thinking you have a 1 in 6 chance of surviving? And this isn't a 16% mortality rate if you’ve been infected, this stat is referring to women giving birth in hospitals...period. 

Dr. Semmelweis was a young doctor appointed to direct the maternity ward at a hospital in Vienna in the 1840’s. The mortality rate in his hospital disturbed him (as it should have for any doctor) enough that he dedicated his time to solving it. Unlike most hospital directors, he had a unique experiment set up in that he was currently operating 2 clinics with significantly different mortality rates. One was a paying clinic operated with doctors and their students and the other, with a far lower mortality rate, was a free clinic operated with midwives. He tested every variable his medical mind could think of, but was hitting one dead end after the next. 

One day, a doctor cut himself while working on a cadaver and ended up dying from the same symptoms as you would get with childbed fever. Perhaps there was something on the cadavers that was being past on to the mothers during labor. He started having his doctors wash their hands a low and behold, the infection rate immediately declined. 

Dr. Semmelweis observed something clinically, asked a question, tested it and achieved dramatic results. These steps were historically the fundamentals of scientific discovery, but that was no longer true during his time. The century prior gave way to mechanistic thought. Ideas weren’t provable unless you could show the mechanisms that made them “scientifically” provable. In other words, things couldn’t just be provable in practice, they had to be provable in theory. 

Poor Semmelweis didn’t yet have the tools to prove his theory. Germs were yet to be fully understood. His evidence for handwashing was anecdotal and the best mechanism he could come up with involved “cadaver particles,” which sounded crazy. He may have saved many lives in his hospital, but his ideas were publicly scorned across Europe as unscientific nonetheless. 

The funny thing to me is that none of the rebuttals he faced were scientific in nature. One of my favorite rebuttals of the time was that some doctors refused to think that “gentlemen hands” were capable of passing disease. Pretty good, right? And this illustrates what Semmelweis was up against...blind arrogance. At the time, only the most privileged of society could afford to become doctors and there existed a communal refusal to believe that doctors were the problem. Think about it. Imagine doctors all over Europe losing their patients to childbed fever, then performing autopsies on the bodies in an attempt to find out what went wrong, only to move on to the next patient, carrying with them the very problem they were trying so hard to find. It’s tragic to think about.

And speaking of tragic, Dr. Semmelweis reverted to handing out pamphlets on the streets, which urged women to not have babies in hospitals because the doctors will kill them. This is equivalent to the videos from doctors that Youtube would delete nowadays. He became so emotionally distraught that he ended up in an insane asylum, where he got beaten up by guards. The sad irony of it was that his wounds then became infected and he died of septicemia. 

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was labeled as a crazy person and lost what should have been a long and prosperous career because he thought differently and found a solution where no one else was looking. Thousands of lives were lost because the scientific community was too arrogant to test his theories. 

We have to ask ourselves if we’d rather be right or be learning. Try to become friends with what you don’t know and remember that every person you meet knows more about at least one thing than you do. And let’s do our best to encourage scientific curiosity instead of conformity.