Monday, July 15, 2019

WEEKLY COMMENTARY: Why Don't New Facts Necessarily Change a Contrary Belief Which Is Already Strongly- Held?


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 social 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 thus become so important to us that they become an essential part of 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 persistent 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 blood stream.

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 requiring use of 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 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 said to be in conflict with established medical 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 literal Bible 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 literal Bible teaching would alienate them from their particular social, political or religious group and it's values.  Many times it is just that doubters feel that it is actually their established identity and unique sense of self that are being challenged by the new information, not just the truth of the newly proposed facts.

We tend to side with people who share our identity.  However, 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 thought 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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