Consider the case of poor Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician who was troubled by the fact that so many new mothers were dying in the hospital in Vienna where he worked. He concluded that their strange “childbed fever” might somehow be linked to the autopsies that he and his colleagues performed in the mornings, before delivering babies in the afternoons—without washing their hands in between. The existence of germs had not yet been discovered, but Semmelweis nonetheless believed that the doctors were transmitting something to these women that caused their illness. His observations were
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