January 31, 2019 Thursday

Bedtime Story 

Effectiveness of Calcium Hypochlorite as Hand Wash

The good doctor thought that since the agent gets rid of the putrid vile smell of infected autopsy cadaveric tissues it might perhaps also be able to destroy the “poisonous cadaverous molecules” that was hypothetically being transmitted from the forensic rooms to the maternity wards.

So he initiated the practice of hand washing before entering the obstetrics ward with calcium hypochlorite.       

With this simple act of cleaning hands with calcium hypochlorite Semmelweis brought down the mortality rate of the first clinic by an astonishing margin of 90%.

The statistics are telling.

In the April of 1847 the maternal mortality rate was 18.43% which is a stupefying death of nearly 20 women for every 100 mothers in labor.

The hand washing was initiated in mid May of the year of 1847 and the result of its effectiveness was manifest the very next month.

The month of June saw a mortality rate of a mere 2.2%.

In July it went further down to 1.2% though in August it went slightly up to 1.9%.

The greatest feat and the unbelievable occurred in the months that followed these where for the first time in the history of these two obstetrics clinics the maternal death rate was zero!

How do you think this tremendous achievement was viewed in those times by the medical fraternity?

You might expect that Semmelweis would have been greeted with show and aplomb and awarded national Medal of Honor both by the state and the Scientific Academy if there existed one.

Nothing of this sort happened.     

Not only was his ideas ignored but also subjected to rejection and ridicule.

Worse was to follow.

For political reasons Semmelweis was dismissed from the hospital and began to be harassed by the medical community of the Vienna.

The humiliation was so insufferable that eventually Semmelweis was forced to leave Vienna and move to Budapest then under the House of Hapsburg but soon to become Austria-Hungary thanks to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.

This deal to some extent re-established the sovereignty of Kingdom of Hungary making it more of a partner of the Austrian Empire than its subject.

It was indeed a very strange setting that would be unacceptable in today’s times anywhere in the world.

Austria-Hungary would have one single Monarch who in the Austrian half of the empire would be known as the Emperor of Austria and who in the Kingdom of Hungary would be recognized as the King of Hungary.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

January 30, 2019 Wednesday

Bedtime Story 

Introducing Calcium Hypochlorite Ca(ClO)2 in Clinic 

It is the molecular chlorine that is released from the compound that is responsible for destroying or disabling a wide range of potentially harmful bacteria and viruses.

Semmelweis was obviously ignorant of this information of the mode of action of molecular chlorine and bromine on microbes.

So why did he chose calcium hypochlorite?

Well, most of would have used bleaching powder by this age or come across the powder being strewn across public places that are considered to be highly contaminated and putrid.

While going across such an area you may also have noticed that the bleaching powder has an ability to squelch out the putrid vile smell from rotting places and overpowering that smell with its own characteristic odor of chlorine.

That happens when calcium oxychloride reacts with carbon dioxide of the atmosphere to calcium carbonate and release chlorine as gas.

It is this chlorine that destroys the smell of putrefaction of animal tissue decomposition.

It was the French chemist and pharmacist Antoine-Germain Labarraque who somewhere around 1820 some two decades before Ignaz Semmelweis had won a French award for showing that a solution of sodium hypochlorite destroys the smell of putrefaction as well as retards the decomposition.  

This discovery found its application in the gut factories France that was a notoriously stinking business but rather a profitable one as the intestines of animals had its use in the manufacturing of musical instrumental strings, Goldbeater’s skin and so on.

In 1824 when the French Emperor Kind Louis XVIII died of extensive gangrene and the body had began to emit foul smell Labarraque was able to get rid of it by covering the dead gangrenous body of the king with a sheet soaked in calcium hypochlorite.

In 1826 Labarraque went on to publish a treatise titled “the application of chlorides to hygiene and therapeutics” for which he was awarded a medal by the French Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts based at Marseille.

Very soon thereafter by 1830 as more research was carried on the action of chlorides and hypochlorites of lime and of sodium the use of them began to broaden from gut factories to latrines, sewers, markets, abattoirs, hospitals, anatomical theatres, morgues, streets, prisons, infirmaries, cattle-shed, stables and any place foul-smelling you could think of.

The chemicals also began to be used for embalming, during exhumations and during outbreak of epidemics of illnesses in Paris and France.

But Austria was still sterile from the enlightenment of action of chlorides and hypochlorites of calcium and sodium.       

So it was thanks to the French pharmacist Labarraque that Semmelweis made the choice of sodium hypochlorite as an agent with which to wash hands before initiating any clinical work for doctors and midwives.      

What did you think was the result of the action taken by the good Austrian obstetrician?

It was nothing short of dramatic and sensational!

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

January 29, 2019 Tuesday

Bedtime Story 

Intelligence

The intelligence is more in the technical sense and not in general sense as we commonly understand it though I am quite sure most of us really do not understand what intelligence is.

In fact different learned people often come out with different definitions of intelligence though in general they all agree that intelligence “among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.”

Considering this definition it becomes quite apparently a dubious proposition to consider all apes as intelligent.

Lot of learned men also agree that intelligence does NOT pertain to “merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts”.

And all the while for almost forty five or so years I revered men who fell and excelled in the second category and not the first (though I have a feeling that those belonging to the first category are hard to come by since they are genuinely rare and few). 

To the mathematicians and computer scientists who had gathered at the Dartmouth College it was transparent that humans were machines and humans could be intelligent that machines too could in principle be made to be intelligent.

This Dartmouth is the same Ivy League Dartmouth College located in Hanover, New Hampshire which arguably is the least famous of the eight private Ivy League Universities located in the north-Eastern United States.

Solomonoff is most famous as the inventor of algorithmic probability which arose as a fusion of four ideas that were in some sort mutually incompatible or at least disparate:

(1) Occam’s razor

(2) Epicurus’ principle of multiple explanations – which states that if more than one theory is consistent with the observations, keep all such theories.

(3) Universal Turing Machine

(4) Bayes’ rule for prediction

Two of these you should be well aware of if you follow my bedtime stories.

The other two we can keep it for later.      

For now we shall return to Semmelweis and see what happened to his preposterous theory of “cadaverous particles”.  

Semmelweis was not the one to stay quiet because he felt had he had sufficient evidence in hand (pun intended) to initiate some sort of preventive action.

He immediately initiated a policy for doctors and medical students of washing hands after the autopsy work and before proceeding to the obstetrics department for delivery.

                  

Instead of normal soap and water he proposed chlorinated lime or calcium hypochlorite which is the main ingredient of bleaching powder.

Today it is commonly used as an agent to sanitize public swimming pools and disinfect drinking water.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

January 28, 2019 Monday

Bedtime Story 

Preposterous Theory

Semmelweis was not so naïve so as to be unaware that he lacked the evidence for his theory of “cadaverous particles”.

So he might have said something to this effect:

Hey guys look, you may not believe in my theory but all that I am asking you is to maintain cleanliness and you will see the results for yourself.

Always remember that when you make tall magical claims (magical is anything that is unknown to the current science or alien to present technology) the onus is on you to provide the evidence and equally substantial evidence at that.

I am not certain but the fact that Semmelweis was a German of the mid nineteenth century he would have been aware of this elementary logical truth since Europe centered on Germany at that time at being on the forefront of scientific breakthroughs in almost all the fields. 

The theory of “cadaverous particles” was as preposterous in those days as today’s proposal that our brain is merely a computing device and consciousness is a product of simulation that our neocortex is capable of.

No one has put it better to me than Joscha Bach:

“Some people think that simulation can’t be conscious and only a physical system can.

But they got it completely backward.

A physical cannot be conscious only a simulation can be conscious.

Consciousness is a simulated property of the simulated self.”

These lines shook me and gave me that hair-raising tingling feeling exactly the type that I got after reading the masterpiece “The Selfish Gene” ten years ago in 2009.

This is probably the ultimate Occam’s razor that obviously would be unacceptable to most of you apes as was the theory of “cadaverous particles” in Semmelweis.

Whereas most do not have any difficulty in accepting our dreams to be the simulation of an active brain the consciousness which is a near real-time simulation or modeling of the world around us via the data collected through our senses in real time sounds quite disagreeable to us.

This idea or perhaps the principle that minds are generating a simulation, a dream so to speak, from sensory data such as photons hitting our two retinas did not originally come up to Bach.

This idea was originally proposed by a mathematician and computer scientist by the name of Ray Solomonoff who was born in Cleveland Ohio in 1926 to Jewish Russian immigrants.

It was he along with Marvin Minsky (son of an eye surgeon) and John McCarthy who got seriously interested in machine learning, organized the seminal Dartmouth Workshop (Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence) in 1956 that lasted six to eight weeks and perhaps where the science of Artificial Intelligence was born.

It was six weeks of relentless brain storming primarily by mathematicians who dared to think that computers could be made intelligent.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

January 27, 2019 Sunday

Bedtime Story 

Ignaz Semmelweis Lacked Proof

Though specifically Ignaz Semmelweis may have been wrong or inaccurate but epistemologically he was dead accurate in his conjecture.

On hind sight this was a theory (“cadaverous particles”) that had all the hall marks of the famous Occam’s razor in that it provided the answer or the solution to the problem with fewest assumptions.

It explained why the infection rate in the first clinic was as high as the medical students and doctors were engaged in autopsies.

It also explained why the infection rate among the women in labor was low in the second clinic as midwives had no connection with cadavers and were disconnected from the forensic department.

It further explained why even the women who chose to deliver on the streets had far fewer infection rate and even compatible with that of the second clinic as they were untouched by the soiled hands of medical doctors.

The solution of “cadaverous particles” proposed by Semmelweis thus solved three problems with one simple theory though of course he did not have any established proof or evidence.

It would be four decades later when yet another German physician would establish the rules of establishing the causal link between a microbe and a disease.

These rules are now known as Koch’s postulates though they were established by two German bacteriologists jointly namely the legendary Robert Koch and lesser known or largely unknown Friedrich Loeffler.

These two men in turn had developed their work based upon the work of yet another German physician, pathologist and anatomist by the name of Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle whose name is found littered in the textbooks of anatomy, histology and pathology.

The evidence that Semmelweis needed was still unavailable to him as it lay in the future.

What he actually needed to prove would have required him to follow the four steps or postulates of Koch namely:

(1) The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms.

(2) The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture.

(3) The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.

(4) The microorganism must be reisolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent.  

Semmelweis was incapable of carrying out not even one step of these four since microbiology as a science was yet to be born.     

And yet even though he lacked the proof the claim made by him was in principle a testable and a falsifiable one.

It was a scientific theory.  

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

January 26, 2019 Saturday

Bedtime Story 

Semmelweis Gets the Connection 

Tonight we shall continue with the writing of Semmelweis that is found in the Lancet issue of 1855 where he is befittingly giving a clinical and forensic description of the death of his friend and the professor of forensic medicine.

“Then [...] he died of bilateral pleurisy, pericarditis, peritonitis and meningitis [inflammation of the membranes of the lungs and thoracic cavity, of the fibroserous sac surrounding the heart, of the membranes of the abdomen and pelvic cavity, and of the membranes surrounding the brain, respectively.]

A few days before he died, a metastasis also formed in one eye.

I was still animated by the art treasures of Venice, but the news of Kolletschka’s death agitated me still more.

In this excited condition I could see clearly that the disease from which Kolletschka died was identical to that from which so many hundred maternity patients had also died.

The maternity patients also had lymphangitis, peritonitis, pericarditis, pleurisy, and meningitis, and metastasis also formed in many of them.

Day and night I was haunted by the image of Kolletschka’s death and was forced to recognize, ever more decisively, that the disease from which Kolletschka died was identical to that from which so many maternity patients died.”

For the first time in the life of Semmelweis as a doctor there shone a light across the tunnel that had been pitch dark and depressing.

Semmelweis now had a cause or if not the true case a sort of causal connection for the maternal deaths that had been gnawing at his deepest level of mind.

It became clear to him that there was some sort of connection between cadaveric examination and bedside fever.

Mind you, the very idea of infection the way we understand it today was unknown then since the germ theory of disease had still not found universal acceptance.

At least at the Vienna General Hospital the germ theory of disease was neither known nor accepted.

Here again I wish to emphasize the essence of scientific theory which is deeply misunderstood by most apes.

“It is only a theory” is a common refrain of the unversed associating the word “theory” with some vague dreamy hypothesis or an idea that has no practical bearing.

That is completely inaccurate and must be done away with immediately for it is the one thing that this bedtime story must achieve if nothing else.

Since microbes were just at the threshold of discovery and microbiology still to be born the association of germs with diseases was still at infancy.

For lack of anything better Semmelweis formulated his idea of bedside fever being spread by medical students from cadavers to women in labor through transmission of “cadaverous particles” through their hand.

Rather an interesting choice of words I must say though nothing neoteric about them.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

January 25, 2019 Friday

Bedtime Story 

Semmelweis Analyzes the Problem

Semmelweis categorically and meticulously began to list out the differences of practice in the two clinics.

So meticulous was he that he even included the difference of religious practices in the two.

One thing he had ruled out was overcrowding as a factor for these epidemics since it was evident that the second clinic had far more crowd that the first one, both since it admitted more patients and because it was run by mid wives than doctors.      

You would remember that many or most women would simply refuse to get admitted in the first clinic preferring the ignominy of roadside delivery.

Climate obviously could not be the factor (mind you those days climate was given disproportionate importance in the etiology of diseases) since both clinics worked in the same climate.

After enlisting all such differences he saw that the only variability of substance between the two clinics was the type of professionals who worked there.

Both the first and the second clinic were a part of the teaching institute, the key difference being that while the first one was demarcated solely for the medical students the second one was allocated to the training of mid wives.

That, of course, only deepened the mystery.

The mystery probably would have remained unsolved when the first clue came in the form of a personal tragedy.

His close friend Jakob Kolletschka who was a Professor of Forensic Medicine in the same Vienna General Hospital died on March 20, 1847.

That was a moment in the life of Semmelweis when he had become so overwhelmed from the grief of the accumulating maternity deaths that he had left for Venice as something of a sabbatical (I wonder if such a concept existed those days).

When the news of his friend reached him he immediately rushed back from Venice to Vienna and I would like you to read what Semmelweis later wrote about it as quoted in the Lancet issue of 1855.

The material is medically very relevant to the ongoing story:

“I was immediately overwhelmed by the sad news that Professor Kolletschka, whom I greatly admired, died in the interim.

The case history went as follows:

Kolletschka, Professor of Forensic Medicine, often conducted autopsies for legal purposes in the company of the students.

During one such exercise, his finger was pricked by a student with the same knife that was being used in the autopsy.

I do not recall which finger was cut.

Professor Kolletschka contracted lymphangitis and phlebitis (inflammation of the lymphatic vessels and of the veins respectively) in the upper extremity.”

We shall continue with the writing of Semmelweis in nights to come.  

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg