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Monday, August 30, 2021

Semmelweis reflex. Rejecting truth due to your worldview.

Perfectly apt in the world seized by the madness of the Corona religion.

by StFerdIII

 

 

Ignaz-Semmelweis

 

Amended from source.

There are parallels between Semmelweis in 1847, and the Corona Medical fascism in 2020-2021.  In both cases the ‘establishment’, the ‘media’, and the vested interests who profit from the reigning paradigm, or in the case of Corona, the now redefined word ‘pandemic’, attacked, slandered, abused and in many cases, including Semmelweis, murdered any who opposed the ‘consensus’ viewpoint.  With the unenlightened narrative around Corona, a mild disease with a 99.8% survival, the ‘scientific consensus’ demands that everyone, even those not at risk, be stabbinated, but not just once or twice.  Every government and agency is now openly planning for 5 years of stabbing and in some countries (Canada, Australia) have pre-ordered enough pharmaceutical concoctions to jabbinate every person twice, in the next 5 years.  If this does not strike you as odd, given the chance of death for someone under 60 is 7/10000 of 1%, than you are a brainwashed fool.

 

Born Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp in what is now the Hungarian capital Budapest, he was educated at the universities of Pest and Vienna, and received a medical degree from the latter in 1844. In July 1846, he was appointed assistant to Johann Klein, professor of obstetrics at the Vienna General Hospital. Semmelweis immediately proceeded to investigate the cause of childbed fever—“over the strong objections of his chief, who, like other continental physicians had reconciled himself to the idea that the disease was unpreventable.”

 

The First Division was staffed by male doctors and medical students, and the death rate from childbed fever there was several times higher than in the Second Division, where only female midwives were involved. “Why the difference?” wondered Semmelweis.

 

From May 1847, Semmelweis ordered all doctors and students in the First Division to wash their hands and brush their fingernails in a chlorine solution before they attended the mothers in the maternity wardHe didn’t know that the wash was actually killing germs; chlorine wash was simply the best way he knew of to remove the strong offensive odour of autopsy tissue from the doctor’s hands.

 

The result was astounding: “During the last seven months of the year, only 56 women died, of the 1,841 delivered in the First Division. In 1848 … the First Division had a puerperal death rate of 1.2 percent, and the Second Division of 1.3 percent, virtually equal.”

 

Semmelweis’s conclusions contradicted the prevailing establishment consensus that the disease was unpreventable. Furthermore, his solution implicated the doctors involved.

 

He ruled out possible causes such as overcrowding—the number of deliveries annually was about the same in each division, usually between 3,000 and 3,500.  Also the climate was the same for both, likewise any supposed ‘bad air’. Different birthing positions, diet, and ventilation also all had no effect.

 

But there was one very important difference. Doctors in the First Division performed autopsies each morning on mothers who had died the previous day, and they then came directly from the dissecting room to the delivery room to attend to births. Midwives, who attended Second Division births, were excluded from the dissecting room. Semmelweis also noted that childbed fever was rare in women who gave birth away from the hospital, e.g. at home with the help of a midwife or private doctor, or even with self-delivery on the street. “How could these dissimilar events be significant?” he pondered. And, “Why did the babies of mothers who had died also frequently die of a similar fever, and have similar autopsy abnormalities?”

 

Semmelweis’s conclusions contradicted the prevailing establishment belief that the disease was unpreventable. Furthermore, his solution implicated the doctors involved. If he was correct, then the doctors who assisted mothers giving birth without first decontaminating their hands were inadvertently responsible for those same mothers’ deaths.

 

Semmelweis’s theory that cleanliness was the key was therefore rejected and ridiculed by his older contemporaries. His position at the hospital expired in March 1849, and Prof. Klein refused to renew it. Frustrated, Semmelweis abruptly returned to Pest in 1850, and for the next six years was director of obstetrics at St Rochus Hospital there. His chlorine-water measures reduced the maternity mortality rate here to 0.85%. However, Vienna (where the deathrate was still 10 to 15%) remained hostile to him, and the editor of the Viennese Medical Weekly (Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift) wrote that “it was time to stop the nonsense about chlorine hand wash.”

 

Finally, in 1861, Semmelweis published his principal treatise on the cause and prevention of childbed fever. A major objection was that Semmelweis could not produce a demonstrable cause for his conclusion. The Austrian medical establishment rejected his proposal of unobserved “minuscule and largely invisible amounts of decaying organic matter”. But this didn’t disprove that there really was a statistically proven phenomenon of transmissible fatal disease. The chlorine hand-wash did reduce maternal mortality, even though no one knew why at the time. It was unreasonable for them to reject the existence of the phenomenon just because a cause had not yet been discovered.

 

As time went by, Semmelweis became angrier, more dejected, and more stressed. In 1865, he was detained in a mental hospital against his will. When he tried to leave, he was severely beaten by the guards, bound in a straitjacket, and imprisoned in a darkened cell. Two weeks later, at the age of 47, he died from a septic wound, probably caused by the beating.

 

Shortly thereafter, Louis Pasteur confirmed the existence of microorganisms. This offered a theoretical explanation of Semmelweis’s observations; his ‘cadaverous particles’ were in fact bacteria. Sir Joseph Lister, Bt., ‘the father of modern surgery’, learning of Pasteur’s work, began applying antiseptic procedures to the practice of surgery, resulting in a dramatic fall in post-operative deaths from infection. Lister’s ideas, too, were greeted with skepticism and it took nearly 30 years for ‘Listerism’, or antiseptic surgery, to become accepted medical practice. Lister himself acknowledged: “Without Semmelweis my achievements would be nothing. To this great son of Hungary Surgery owes most.”

 

The Semmelweis reflex is the informal name coined for the tendency of people to deny new evidence or knowledge that contradicts established beliefs or their worldview. As Semmelweis experienced, long-held ideas can remain entrenched despite potent evidence to the contrary, and people can and do persecute those who challenge the consensus, even when th