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.
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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:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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