Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Semmelweis noticed that the incidence of childbed or puerperal
fever was quite high in his ward and, schooled in Descartes’s
machine view of the body, considered a number of causes for
the illness that accorded with that picture.
But when another doctor died from childbed fever after being
accidentally cut with a scalpel during an autopsy, Semmelweis
considered the possibility that the doctors themselves were a
vehicle for the ailment.
He then demanded that people working on his ward clean their
smocks and wash their hands with a chlorine solution before
assisting with a birth. Childbed fever cases fell dramatically.
bacteria present in both dead and infected tissue.
This idea, however, was widely rejected. The human was
thought to be a machine, and all problems with the machine
could only be caused by parts of the machine malfunctioning.
The idea that there were tiny animals inside us making us sick
seemed silly.
After Frenchman Louis Pasteur’s work, the germ theory of illness
became accepted, and we had to change our picture of reality.
We were no longer “ghosts in a machine” but castles surrounded
by hostile one-celled barbarians. Blood was no longer thought of
cells were now thought of as armed guards doing battle with tiny
invaders. This was a completely different foundation from which to
understand human physiology and health.
In the century that followed Semmelweis, this standpoint led to
vaccines that eradicated diseases from smallpox to polio and to
new ways of life. Cleanliness was not just next to godliness but the
source of continued life itself.
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