Inferring and Explaining

64 InferrIng and exPlaInIng t 6 . Childbed fever is caused by the intro- duction to the blood of a certain strain of bacteria. fever and know that their cause is certain kinds of bacteria. You might argue, therefore, that a better explanation would be as follows: Indeed, we would nowadays say that all the evidence, including a lot that was yet to come, strongly supports exactly such a theory. We would probably even say that we “know for cer- tain” that childbed fever is caused by a bacterial infection. But all this is how the evidence stands at the beginning of the twenty-frst century. Bacteria were completely unknown in Semmel- weis’s day, andwhat he called “cadaver particles” was a pretty accurate placeholder for their exis- tence and causal role in childbed fever. The Tragedy of Semmelweis Te story of Ignác Semmelweis should have ended in glory. He single-handedly solved a ter- rible medical mystery and saved countless lives. But glory was not to be his fate. He became so obsessed, frst with solving the problem of childbed fever and then with insisting that col- leagues immediately adopt his new methods, that he became a little hard to live with. He actually accused skeptical colleagues of mur- der for not disinfecting their hands. To make matters worse, his direct superior was part of the entrenched older generation and never accepted the theory or the empirical method- ology that led to its discovery. In 1848, when his assistantship was up, he was denied reap- pointment to his position at the Vienna General Hospital. He took all this very badly, and despite the support of Rokitansky, Skoda, and Herba, he abruptly departed Vienna and returned to Budapest. He still might have garnered the fame and prestige he so richly deserved had he only pub- lished his results shortly afer the discovery. As we discussed earlier, he was never comfortable with his speaking abilities and even less so with his writing. He simply did not alert the Euro- pean medical community to what he had dis- covered. His friend, Herba, did make a couple of short reports that were eventually published, but all this was distinctly secondhand. When he fnally did write a book about childbed fever, it was much later and consisted as much in char- acter assassination of those colleagues who dis- agreed with his theory as it did of the clinical and experimental fndings. Semmelweis, like all of us, was a prisoner of his times, his personality, and his training and interests. He was pretty much ignorant of good experimental technique. Although he and a medical student did conduct one inconclu- sive set of experiments with rabbits, he did not pursue the systematic animal experimentation that would have strongly supported his theory. And although microscopes had been invented and were being used by medical researchers, it apparently never occurred to him to look and see if he could observe those cadaver particles frsthand. One can only imagine the course of medical history had he done so. Semmelweis went to an early grave an embit- tered and disappointed man. He continued to practice in Hungary but never attained the recognition he craved. In early middle age, he began to behave erratically and was ultimately