February 01, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
Why was Semmelweis Ridiculed and Rejected?
Semmelweis knew that he was right and the
treatment that was handed out to him by the medical fraternity infuriated him.
Perhaps it was this ill-treatment and
insult thrown upon him at his finest hour that would soon lead to his nervous
breakdown.
So angered was he by these recurrent
insults that be began to write and send letters to the prominent obstetricians
accusing them of being willful murderers.
Many of his colleagues began to think that
he was losing his mind.
Even his very own wife thought so.
Why do you think that so many people in the
medical establishment refused to accept what is now an established
“commonsensical” knowledge?
Even a hard-core religious believer in the
Good and Almighty Lord has no hesitation in accepting that this very Lord has
unleashed upon us billions of deadly microbes including viruses and fungi that
are hell bent to destroy us given even the slightest of opportunity.
It is because their minds were not Tabula
rasa or a blank slate but were infested with the centuries-old meme of the
theory of four humors of the Hippocratic medicine.
The four humors were described by
Hippocrates in and around 400 BC who has been assigned the title of Father of
Medicine.
It is such titles around individuals that accord
an aura of invincibility and indomitability around such men and the ideas that
they spawn.
So intense and undisputable are these
bestowed upon accolades and honoraries that anyone who dares to suggest anything
that even sparingly challenges them meet the fate of Semmelweis.
It was in his treatise “On the Nature of
Man” that Hippocrates proposed formally his theory of humors concerning medical
diseases:
“The Human Body contains blood, phlegm,
yellow bile and black bile.
These are the things that make up its
constitution and cause its pain and health.
Health is primarily that state in which
these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both
in strength and quantity, and are well mixed.
Pain occurs when one of the substances
presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separated in the body and not
mixed with others.”
Indeed an appealing theory and avowedly very
intuitive.
“Harmony”, “balance”, “proportions” and
such words and ideas seem to have a great mass appeal and till date are used by
all charlatans and dream sellers.
This theory was taken as a gospel truth and
transferred not only from generation to generation but civilization to
civilization starting with Greeks.
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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