Common Knowledge

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“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)




Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician who lived in the 1800’s when the understanding of infectious disease being caused by microbes was still in it’s infancy. He worked in a Viennese hospital where he observed that women who gave birth in the hospital wing where medical students were trained had a very high mortality rate; much higher than that of women in an adjoining hospital wing attended by midwives, and even higher than women who didn’t set foot in the hospital at all, but gave birth at home.


Like all medical students, the doctors-to-be at Vienna General Hospital dissected cadavers in anatomy class as part of their medical training. Most of the women dying after childbirth had been treated by student physicians who worked on cadavers before beginning their rounds in the maternity ward.

Even though Germ Theory was not well known at the time, Semmelweis hypothesized that the medical students carried “cadaver particles” from autopsy into the delivery rooms, and that these particles caused the new mothers to become ill with, and frequently die from, puerperal fever.

Semmelweis began to require his medical student to wash their hands with chlorinated water (a solution used to eliminate the smell cadavers). His experiment was shown to be a success, when, the following year, mortality rates in the ward fell from over 18% to 1.3%.


Even with this impressive data, Semmelweis was scorned and ridiculed by his peers for his strange ideas about hand washing, and was eventually forced to leave his post at the hospital.
Long after Dr. Semmelweis had been committed for depression and ultimately died of a Streptococcus infection (the same bacteria that caused puerperal fever), the idea of handwashing was accepted as a necessary component of public heath.

(adapted from www.experiment-resources.com)


Something (hand washing) that we all take for granted, common knowledge, was first ridiculed for lack of ‘proof/evidence.’ It was opposed for many years, probably contributed to Dr Semmelweis’ deadly infection. The irony is uncanny.


Today, we think that medicine is highly evolved and self evident. I believe that 100 years from now will unveil massive discoveries and change the course of ‘health care’ as we know it today. I just finished watching a documentary about Dr Burzynski, a physician who cures cancer with non toxic gene-targeted ‘antineoplastons.’ He is ridiculed by conventional medicine and has been battling the FDA for 14 years, 60 million dollars spent of government money.

I simply ask people to use their minds when it comes to ‘accepted’ treatments, and what is ‘right.’ Posted this history to bring awareness to more people. Knowledge isn’t power, utilizing that knowledge - that’s powerful!