UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis made a legendary discovery in the field of medicine and obstetrics. He unconventionally proposed that washing your hands with a chlorinated lime solution would drastically reduce child-born fever, a common illness of the day. Think his peers showered him with rewards and accolades? Unfortunately not. Because Dr. Semmelweis’s discovery conflicted with conventional medical knowledge, the mainstream medical community blasted his claim, rejecting it as bunk and hooey. While some dismissed the discovery (and the data) based on scientific reasoning, others spurned it because it was unconscionable to presume that an upper-class gentleman, a physician, would have untidy and unclean hands. Despite ridicule from his peers, Dr. Semmelweis stood convicted to his discovery for years. By opposing the consensus, eventually his colleagues branded him a whack job and banished him from practice. In 1865, Dr. Semmelweis was committed to an insane asylum where he’d die just weeks later, purportedly at the hands of asylum guards. While his committal circumstances were never verified (perhaps having your life’s work disparaged?), his death went relatively unnoticed, if not celebrated by those who contemptibly viewed his discovery.