E2 started giving me 504 gateway not found messages on the seventeenth. It seems to be back but I didn't get any writing done on Monday. I could have done it offline but I've done write-ups for things that already existed but under slightly different names or spellings so without even the capacity to check if somethings been written it's hard to muster the will.
Instead I spent forty five minutes trying to find Ignaz Semmelweis without knowing his name. Germ theory brings up a lot about Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch but Semmelweis work was the set up for germ theory not germ theory itself. I think about Semmelweis's story when I'm down about the present and its institutional dysfunction. The galling thing about his story is not that the hospital had a abysmal rate of women dying of preventable infections because the staff that did the deliveries had their hands in corpses hours before; it's that the midwives had one ninth the death rate in the same building and none of the doctors thought that this discrepancy was worth investigating except Semmelweis. The constant resistance to the chlorinated hand washing after that is damning too. I'm actually not sure I can think of anything that makes me more ashamed of the human race. Genocides, self-aggrandizing fraud, and sadism are all awful but they each have there own internal logic. Medical researchers that see a one to nine ratio and don't investigate the cause make no sense. If you can't find it in you to care about the deaths of mothers and children can't you at least take a professional interest in that? The modern world has its problems but I think we have made significant progress. Actually, I know we've made significant progress since the child mortality rate has dropped by a factor of fifteen globally.
I'm a cautious optimist for the most part. A lot of that outlook comes from deliberately looking at history's ugliest features. During its highest levels smallpox is suspected to have killed one in ten people in the old world. That's not of the people who contracted it, that's the entire living population. It killed thirty percent of people who contracted it and blinded and disfigured a significant number of the survivors. We eliminated it in the 1970s. Like I said, I'm optimistic. Reading about the horrors of the past makes me like that. Ignaz Semmelweis suffer horribly for caring about others but we live in the world he wanted and his critics are reviled on the rare occasions that they aren't forgotten.
IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING