The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

But instead, his fellow physicians—principally upper-class gentlemen—were offended by the implication that their hands were unclean, and they questioned the scientific basis of his “cadaverous particles,” which did not accord with their theories of disease. Shortly thereafter Semmelweis was replaced at the Vienna General Hospital. In his new position, at a small hospital in Budapest, his methods brought the death rate from childbed fever down to less than 1 percent. Over the remaining eighteen years of his life, Semmelweis’s revolutionary techniques languished. He grew increasingly frustrated with the medical establishment and eventually suffered a nervous breakdown. He was beaten by guards at a Viennese mental hospital and died of blood poisoning two weeks later, at the age of forty-two. Semmelweis was right about the connection between autopsies and puerperal fever, and the decisions he made on this basis had meaningful consequences. He saved the lives of thousands of infants and women. But his ideas could have saved many more lives if he had been able to convince others of what he knew. In this case, although he communicated his beliefs to other scientists and provided as much evidence as they could possibly desire, his ideas were still rejected, at great cost. The warrantless belief persisted that gentlemen could not communicate disease via contact.