A bulletin board exhibit entitled "The History of Hand
Washing," once on display at Overlook Hospital, illustrates how difficult
it can be to change strongly-held beliefs. It is a story about Dr. Ignaz
Semmelwies.
Moral attitudes are especially difficult to change because
the attached emotions largely define who we are. Certain beliefs
are so important to us that they become part of how we define our identity.
Dr. Semmelwies was the Chief Resident in surgery at the
Vienna General Hospital in 1847. At the time, the theory of diseases was
highly influenced by ideas of an imbalance of the basic "four humors"
in the body, for which the main treatment was blood lettings.
At the Vienna General Hospital there were two OBGYN
clinics. Clinic #1 was a broad-ranging teaching service for medical
students. Clinic #2 was exclusively for the instruction of
midwives. At the time, the staff were quite puzzled about a consistent
difference in the mortality rates of the two clinics.
A good friend of Dr. Semmelwies died after accidentally
being poked with a student's scalpel while performing a postmortem exam.
The autopsy of the deceased friend showed a pathology similar to women in
Clinic #1 who were dying of puerperal fever. The latter is an infection
of a woman's placenta following delivery or abortion, sometimes causing death
by the infection passing into the bloodstream.
Dr. Semmelwies proposed that there could be a connection
between contamination from cadavers and the deadly puerperal fever. He
concluded that he and the medical students carried "cadaverous
particles" on their hands from the autopsy room to the patients in OBGYN
Clinic #1, causing puerperal fever and the higher incidence of patient deaths
than in Clinic #2. He believed this explained why the student midwives in
Clinic #2 (who were not engaged in autopsies and had no contact with the
corpses) saw no mortality.
Dr. Semmelwies instituted a policy of using a solution of
calcium hypochlorite for washing hands between autopsy work and the examination
of patients in Clinic #1. Mortality rates then dropped dramatically in
Clinic #1.
Regardless of these facts, many doctors in Vienna were
offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands. They felt
that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their
hands could be unclean. As a result, Dr. Semmelwies' ideas were rejected
by the medical community. Perfectly reasonable hand-washing proposals
were ridiculed and rejected by Dr. Semmelwies' contemporaries in the
1840's. The ideas of Dr. Semmelwies were in conflict with established
opinions, regardless of being consistent with scientific facts.
It was years after his death that Dr.Semmelwies'
hand-washing requirement earned widespread acceptance, when Louis Pasteur
developed the germ theory of disease. Pasteur's experiments demonstrated
that organisms such as bacteria were responsible for souring wine, beer and
even milk. Today the process he invented for removing bacteria by boiling
and then cooling a liquid (pasteurization) is not in dispute, but it took
decades for acceptance. Today, Dr. Semmelwies is recognized in medical
circles as a pioneer in antiseptic policy.
According to the Overlook Hospital exhibit, "Semmelwies
Reflex" is a term applied today to a certain type of human behavior
characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge when it contradicts
entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms.
For example,when the subject of climate change comes up in
conversation today, some people deny the scientific findings which many other
people have accepted as true. Likewise, if we think humans and other
living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,
can we accept as fact the theory of Evolution? To believe in Evolution
requires some rejection of Biblical teaching, which in turn could cause some
believers to fear that they are compromising their deeply-held religious belief
system ---- perhaps weakening their long-held belief in God and his power over
us. Furthermore, some might fear that such rejection of Bible teaching
would alienate them from their particular social, political or religious group
and its values. Many times it is just that doubters feel that it is actually
their established identity and sense of self that
are being challenged by the new information.
We tend to side with people who share our identity.
If a member of our identity group makes a major change in his or her identity
beliefs, we might react negatively by calling them a
"flip-flopper". It is as though those who change their
minds by accepting new "facts" are in some way being unfaithful to
their group. This can further discourage one from accepting any new
facts as "true".
However, people change their minds all the time. But
when the identity stakes are high, achieving that change of mind may be hard to
accomplish. That's why just marshaling objective data and making rational
arguments sometimes will not necessarily bring the adoption of new beliefs.
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These thoughts are brought to you by CPC's Adult Spiritual
Development Team, hoping to encourage in you some spiritual growth this summer.
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