Even the New Box is out of the Box

If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone

Hmmm. So me get this straight. We're having a recession, a drastic climate shift, the unending catastrophe of the Malthusian refugee, the same old decline of our moral and social fiber AND a freakin' renaissance? Like the man said, "Everything you want, you got it right here in the USA"

View from the Hubble Space Kaleidoscope....

like totally from the onion, man

Still waiting for that warp drive you promised me

Like Semmelweis, I too love mankind. Unlike Semmelweis, my love has been tempered with a healthy fear. That old fallen nature of man is ominous enough that it can take a considerable effort to consistently act out of my love rather than my fear of man. It makes me feel like I'm in a codependent relationship with a pathological partner. No matter how hard you try to make it work, from time to time people fail, fall, lash out.

The remedy of choice for relationships in this category is to end them, leaving them behind, if possible far, far behind. But since mankind is ever more the dominant species on Earth, man is a lover who is not so easy to leave. Where does one go to escape? I wish I knew. Every time I look out the window, the sad parade of petty tyrants, fools and knaves is still marching by with no evidence that the ranks are thinning.

As far as I can reckon, about the only thing one can do under the circumstances, is to praise the Lord of one's own understanding, and of course, pass the ammunition. :-)

Medicine bites man: Take a number please...

well anyway as I was saying... in a nod to the real, and wonderful autocrat of the breakfast table, Mr. Holmes, Saturday night I happened to read the Wiki biographical entry about a great, but little known man of science Ignaz Semmelweis. Semmelwies discovered that having his clinic staff wash their hands with a chlorinated lime solution after performing autopsies dramatically reduced the mortality rate in the Vienna General Hospital maternity clinic where he was the director. He was of course, rediscovering the principle of contagion, which had been lost in the western world since the fall of the Roman Empire. He tirelessly advocated for doing this and even supported his conclusion with carefully collected statistical evidence, based on his review of the mortality rates of all the major hospitals in Europe for the previous 100 years.

Surprisingly enough, the reaction of the medical community ranged from complete indifference to outright scorn. He not only lost his position, he struggled continue his work for the next 14 years. Employment was so hard for him to find, that he often worked as a volunteer, saving lives in every clinic in which he practiced using the same hygenic methodolgy.

In 1861 he started having "mental problems" of some sort. These are listed in Wikipedia as "severe depression, excessive absent mindedness" and turning "every conversation to the topic of childbed fever" Evidently he was still cognitively intact for he also published Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever that same year. His book was received negatively. In response, he wrote a series of open letters refuting his critics, calling them "irresponsible murderers" and "ignoramuses" among other things.

Theories about the cause of his mental state include senile dementia, emotional exhaustion or even syphilis which was apparently a "common" illness in obstetricians who worked in free clinics (!).

Wiki bios can be prefunctory, so I don't know what justified pathologizing the poor guy's mental breakdown. Personally, I think that simple human frustration and disappointment would have been enough for most people. Semmelweis's professional conduct suggests that he cared very deeply about his patients' safety and clearly understood that failing to heed his findings was causing countless unnecessary deaths. Why else would he have KEPT TRYING to sell his technique to an increasingly hostile medical profession and an oblivious public, even as it cost him his livelihood, his reputation and ultimately his life?

While describing his medical detractors as "irresponsible murderers," isn't exactly concilatory, it does has a certain ring of truth. I read a pair of histories of medicine many years ago and the folly of most of that history is quite sobering. The death toll from bad medical practice prior to the 20th century surely rivals that of warfare, famine or pestilence. Further, he wasn't the only person to make such assertions about the state of medicine in the 1800's.

During the yellow fever outbreak in 1793which kiled thousands of people, an English pamphleteer William Cobbett, published tables that documented the increase in mortality district by district after Benjamin Rush "treated" the populace by bloodletting and purges. Other critics backed up the accusations with similar tables. Cobbett claimed that Rush was bleeding people not because of any scientific findings that supported the practice, but because Rush wanted to be at the helm of something great. Rush sued Cobbett for this, in a courtroom presided over by one of Rush's old friends. A jury awarded $85,000 in damages to Rush - a huge sum at the time. It so ruined Cobbett that he had to flee to England, silencing this rational and vocal critic of Rush's preposterous medical practices.

By 1865, Semmelweis was drinking immoderately. The resulting deterioration in his behavior led to a plot to institutionalize him that resulted in his demise. He was "lured" to an insane asylum. When he realized what was happening, he tried to escape and was severely beaten by one of the attendants. He died two weeks later of internal bleeding, presumably from the beating and was then buried unmourned and unremarked on August 15th at a funeral attended by almost no one.

Now, I've admired Semmelwies since the early 1980's when I first encountered his story in one of those medical histories I read. I don't recall that the account merited more than a paragraph. Interestingly, in 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. had published a very similar hypothesis in America in The New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine. He was even more clearly aware of the real causes of contagion and advocated burning the clothing of anyone who came into contact with the fever and keeping any medical person exposed isolated from patients for a period of six months. I don't know if Dr. Semmelwies was aware of Holmes' data, but his progressively worsening situation suggests that if he did, nobody else did and so it didn't help.

I'm not really sure what prompted me to summon up a more in-depth version Saturday night. Prior to this, I had always recalled his story as another one of those ironic little historical bon mots, which supported my sophomoric interest in history as very, very black humor.

But now that I'm older, sadder and wiser, requainting myself with the tragic arc of his life in more detail seriously disturbed me. At 54, I have so much more experience with the the realities of human suffering and death.

His story interested me in the first place because I thought I saw parallels in my own experience. In my fearless youth, I too was abused for both advocating ideas and doing things that have all become rather commonplace nowadays.

In 1975, I was confined for about a week in Lexington's old-style mental hospital. I ended up there after boldly telling a policeman I didn't think there was anything wrong with being gay. He arrested me for "mental disorderly conduct," a made-up charge. Thankfully, my misadventure was far less traumatic than Semmelweis's. I wasn't beaten up, let alone mortally injured, and thus have lived to tell it and even appreciate a measure of ironic revenge by working for two decades to improve the treatment of the mentally ill in Kentucky's jails. The extent of the brutality I experienced was being forcibly medicated when I declined a tranquilizer. I'm not completely clueless, so this only happened once. Thereafter I cheeked the bulk of the medication and declined to directly confront the unfolding injustice of my incarceration. I got out after a friend noticed I was missing, did a little checking and informed my parents. They stormed in like the cavalry (one of my parents stronger traits) raising holy hell and retrieved me.

That happened when I was 19. Looking back 35 years later, I realize that I didn't fully appreciate just how terrifying this experience and it's implications are. Instead of fleeing the scene of the crime, I went right back to my squalid rooms and quietly resumed my miserably bohemian collegate life in much the same vein as before in the same mean old town. The experience did result in bouts of panic disorder, a malady that gradually worsened until about two years later I was forced to move back home and start over again. Compared to Semmelweis, I was a lucky, lucky guy.

Semmelweis's story is a sobering reminder of one of the common dangers that people who are noticably ahead of their time generally encounter. Innovators and reformers from Socrates to Benazir Bhutto have demonstrated that seeking to improving the world can make the world into a very tough (and dangerous) room. Semmelwies's story is rather unique to me. It's perfectly easy to comprehend why advocating social or political reform can be dangerous to the powers that be. But it's hard to imagine why the proposal of something as innocuous and clearly beneficial as handwashing could result in such a drastic personal catastrophy.

What Semmelweis's story exemplifies I suppose, is that if you should choose to love mankind, you must love us strictly at your own risk. We can be too ignorant to be grateful.