Most physical scientists probably don’t believe they have much to learn from a 19th-century Hungarian obstetrician. However, as it turns out, the life and work of Ignaz Semmelweis can save both your life and your career. If you’ve heard of Semmelweis, it was probably in connection to his groundbreaking work on handwashing (he even has his own Google Doodle). The majority of these accounts simply say that his discovery was, unfortunately, rejected by most of his contemporaries. Yet the reality is a bit more complicated than the comfortable trope of misunderstood genius so often invoked when scientists face stiff opposition from their peers and are later vindicated.
Semmelweis arrived at a practical understanding of personal hygiene’s role in preventing disease many years before Pasteur or Lister did. He worked at Vienna General Hospital during the 1840s, when it was common for women giving birth in the hospital to die of “childbed fever”—now understood to be a massive bacterial infection. Through a series of observations, Semmelweis concluded that doctors were making their patients sick by routinely going straight from autopsies to delivering babies and that washing their hands in between could solve the problem. When Semmelweis introduced handwashing to his ward, he immediately cut the mortality rate by 90%. Semmelweis had unlocked the secret to preventing vast numbers of deaths at essentially zero cost. He should have become a renowned hero in the science of medicine during his own lifetime, but he didn’t.
What went wrong? Semmelweis made a mistake that many scientists have made before and since: He ignored the role that human psychology plays in every human endeavor, including science. Semmelweis had practical results and pushed hard for the adoption of his new protocol, though he did not have a clear theoretical explanation of why it worked. The germ theory of disease had not yet been accepted and there were many alternative disease theories. When other doctors resisted or ignored his call for change, he became increasingly angry. This set off a destructive spiral in which Semmelweis’ insistence that he was right led to more resistance and marginalization within the medical profession. His outrage deepened to the point that he sometimes denounced his fellow physicians as murderers. The situation eventually deteriorated so far that Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died at a relatively young age.
Semmelweis could not see things from the other doctors’ perspective. He was asking them to instantly do three difficult things simultaneously: abandon their long-held beliefs about the nature of disease, accept that their hands were “unclean,” and admit that their actions were responsible for the deaths of many of their patients (even if this was unintentional). That is an unrealistic request given the fundamental human aversion to change and to admitting that we are wrong or at fault for anything. Semmelweis met the natural human reactions of his peers with increasing belligerence. The result was a disaster, both for himself and for the patients who continued to die without the widespread adoption of rigorous handwashing.
What was the alternative? First, Semmelweis could have resolved to take nothing personally and to keep his emotions in check. It is difficult to overstate the importance of these two self-disciplines when dealing with other people. Second, he could have taken the objections of his peers seriously and patiently addressed them through systematic experiments and scholarly publications. Finally, he could have worked on building relationships with influential physicians of the day, persuaded them to test his ideas, and developed strategies to help them save face when accepting his conclusions and their implications.
I believe the trap that Semmelweis fell into is one of the greatest dangers for scientists because it ensnares many to this day. In my career, I do not recall ever seeing a scientist fired for technical incompetence. However, I have seen around ten scientists and engineers either outright fired or marginalized until they quit because they lacked sufficient emotional intelligence and made some or all of Semmelweis’ blunders. Similarly, our public discourse has no shortage of people trying to drive action based on important scientific findings (e.g., reducing carbon emission to blunt climate change) with little or no regard for psychology and human nature. We need to do better, for both ourselves and society.