Inferring and Explaining

65 institutionalized. He died shortly thereafer. anddeathwere a result of the infection. Professor Tere is a common ironic story about his end. Nuland, whose two books on Semmelweis I have Some have suggested that just like his friend used so freely, argues persuasively that Semmel- Kolletschka, Semmelweis became infected with weis, in fact, developed Alzheimer’s disease and childbed fever and that the behavioral changes died from beatings in the mental hospital. exerCIses 1. Use all the steps in the IBE recipe to show how the new data concerning the deathbed priest gives us good evidence that the cause of childbed fever was not psychosomatic. 2. Why did I argue that Semmelweis’s evidence was not undercut by the rival explanation that childbed fever is caused by bacterial infection? Do you agree with me? semmelweIs and ChIldBed feVer QuIz seVen The turning point for Semmelweis and his quest to discover the cause of childbed fever was clearly the death of his colleague, Jakob Kolletschka. Show how this event constituted signif- cant new data that led to a new hypothesis about the disease. Now show how his “order” to the hospital staf about thoroughly “disinfecting” their hands can be seen as a classic little experiment. Given the results of this experiment, use inference to the best explanation to assess the quality of evidence Semmelweis now had as to the (partial) cause of childbed fever. 3 Nuland, 97–98. Notes 4 Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science , 5. 1 Carl Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Engle- 5 Hempel, 4–5. wood Clifs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 3. 6 Quoted in Nuland, Te Doctor’s Plague , 99–100. 2 Teodor Billroth, Te Medical Sciences in German Uni- 7 Nuland, 101. versities (1876), quoted in Sherwood B. Nuland, Te Doctor’s Plague (NewYork: Atlas Books, 2003), 77–78.