In 1847, a doctor at Vienna General Hospital cut the maternity ward death rate from 18% to 2% by requiring handwashing in chlorinated lime solution. The medical establishment repaid him with years of ridicule and eventually committed him to an asylum.
Ignaz Semmelweis had noticed that doctors who went straight from the autopsy table to the delivery room, hands unwashed, were killing roughly one in five mothers they treated. The midwives' clinic next door, where staff never handled corpses, lost barely one in fifty. When Semmelweis required handwashing, deaths fell immediately. Senior physicians, insulted by the implication that their hands had been killing patients for years, refused to accept the evidence. That cadaverous matter could transmit disease contradicted established medical theory, so the evidence was rejected instead.
Semmelweis died in that asylum in 1865, his discovery still unacknowledged. It took Louis Pasteur's germ theory to vindicate him years later.
Author Robert Anton Wilson later named this pattern after him: the Semmelweis reflex, the automatic rejection of new evidence when it contradicts established belief, especially when accepting it would mean admitting past harm. Medical history keeps adding reminders. Anesthesia was dismissed as unnatural. Cigarettes' role in causing lung cancer was contested for decades. Barry Marshall drank a flask of H. pylori bacteria in 1984 to prove it caused ulcers before anyone believed him — he won the Nobel Prize in 2005. Any entrenched institution tends to reject evidence that would require it to admit it was wrong, as Observer Voice explains.
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