Тег: Zemmlweiss

How to Break the System and Not Break Yourself: Bowlby vs. Zheleznitsky

Let’s consider two stories: both about brilliant scientists who decided to “break the system.” One won while he was still alive, and the second died under the pressure of that very same system with which he was trying to fight.

The first hero – John Bowlby. An English psychologist who noticed a simple thing: children should not be separated from their mothers in hospitals. Of course, for us this is an obvious thought, but in the 1950s it was literally a revolution. Bowlby developed the theory of attachment, proving that close emotional bonds with a mother are vital for normal psychological development of a child. If a child is deprived of closeness with his mother in a critical early period, this leads to serious disruptions in the psyche: from feelings of anxiety and depression to deep emotional disorders that can haunt a person’s life.

What was the response of doctors? “It’s nonsense! We’ve always done it like this, and there’s no need to change anything.” In response, Bowlby played a clever move: instead of shouting at doctors and waving figures around, he made a documentary. Such a one that even the most hardened nurses would burst into tears and say: “You can’t do this anymore!”

Bowlby’s success can be explained by several factors immediately. Firstly, he skillfully chose a strategy of persuasion, making a bet not only on dry facts but also on emotions. His film “The Two-Year-Old in the Hospital” vividly showed what suffering a child experiences when deprived of his mother, and this touched the hearts of viewers much more powerfully than reports and graphs. Secondly, Bowlby managed to enlist the support of influential organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and public parent movements. The system itself was ready to change – he simply gave it the final push. Thirdly, time was on his side: old authorities were fading away, and a new generation of doctors already looked at the upbringing and mental health of children differently, accepting Bowlby’s ideas without the usual resistance.

Bowlby didn’t just give arguments – he resonated with people emotionally. And within a few years, he reformed children’s hospitals around the world. Mothers started living with their children in rooms, and the psyche of millions of babies was saved.

And now the second story – Ignácz Zemmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who, 100 years before Bowlby, discovered an equally obvious thing: doctors need to wash their hands before childbirth. Imagine the 19th century: doctors came to pregnant women straight from the anatomy theater, not having washed their hands after dissecting corpses. And Zemmelweis literally explained to colleagues on his fingers that women were dying precisely because of dirty hands of doctors. The result? He was called a madman, dismissed, and then even locked up in a psychiatric hospital, where he died. Quite ironically, from the same infection with which he fought all his life.

Zemel’veysu ne povzelo srazu po neskolko prichin. On byl prakticheski odin protiv vesey meditsinskoy elity svoyego vremeni. Nauchnoa sreda byla prosto ne gotova prinyat ego otkrytiye – ono operedilo svoe vreo chasto na 20 let, do otkrytiya mikrobo kov Pasterm. Zemel’veysu takzhe ne umel gramotno donosit svoi idei, i vsteym spokojnogo dialoga shol v ataku s obvineniyami, chem tolko usilnyal sosprotivleniye kollegov. Otsutstviye institutsionalnoy podderzhki i soyuznikov obreklO ego na tragicheskoye porazheniye. I samoye pechal’noye – on prosto emotsionno vygorel, slomalsya pod davleniyem nespravdlinosti i nepomyaniya.

Sud’by etikh dvukh uchyonnykh napominaet nam prostuyu istinu: vazhno ne tolko byt’ pravym, no i umet’ vybrat’ pravil’nyye metody doneseniya svoikh idey. Dazhe samaya blestnaya mysl’ mozhet progravat’, yesli yeyo ne суметь prepodest’ pravil’no. Zemel’veysu stolknulsya s fenomenom, kotoryy potozha nazvali yego imenem – «effekt Zemel’veysa», slepoe otricheniye ochevidnogo faktu. Boulbi zhe sumel vprevat’ pravdu v mochnoye dvizheniye, pokazav shiryu, chto peremenы vozmozhny.

Kakoy urook iz etogo vyneсем my? Ispol’zuy faktы, ispol’zuy nauku, no glavnoye – ispol’zuy istorii, kotoryye b’yut pryamo v emotsii! Ratsionalnost’, konechno, pobedyt, no ne sama po sebe. Luchshe byt’ kak Boulbi, nezhye Zemel’veys, i slomat’ sistemu krasivo.

Voluntarist, Bitarx

Doctor Semmelweis: Freedom of Thought Against Conservative Dogmas

Imagine a doctor who literally demands that his colleagues wash their hands—and becomes an outcast for it. It sounds anecdotal, but this is exactly what happened to the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis in the mid-19th century.

Vienna, 1840s: in one maternity ward, male doctors stubbornly follow the tradition of going straight from an autopsy to delivering babies without any hygiene. Meanwhile, there is a nearby midwives’ ward where this does not happen. The result shocked Semmelweis: the mortality rate of women in the first case reached 18%, while with the midwives, it was about 2%. The difference was like that between hell and heaven, and the young doctor wondered why.

Puzzled, Semmelweis began his investigation and went through every version, from overcrowded wards to even the position of the moon—until a tragic incident led him to the answer. One of the doctors cut himself with a scalpel during an autopsy and soon died from the same symptoms as puerperal fever. Eureka! Semmelweis realized that an invisible killer was being carried on the doctors’ hands from corpses directly to the mothers. The solution was dauntingly simple: wash hands and instruments with chlorinated water. By today’s standards, this is a banality, but back then, it was a revolution of clean hands.

Now imagine: Semmelweis stands at the head of the ward with a basin of chlorinated lime, demanding that the respected doctors scrub death off their fingers. One would think his colleagues should carry him on their (clean!) hands for saving hundreds of lives. After all, mortality plummeted to the level of the midwives’ ward. But instead of awards and honors, the innovator was met with ridicule and anger. The medical luminaries of the time took the idea as a personal insult: it implied that their own hands were killing patients. Pride and dogma prevailed over logic. Instead of admitting a mistake, the hospital administration preferred to fire the uncompromising doctor and stick to the familiar theory of miasmas—invisible “vapors” supposedly causing the fever. Simply put, Semmelweis’s colleagues rejected his discovery out of fear of the new, and the doctor’s free-thinking was considered dangerous audacity.

The story of Semmelweis is a clear example of how conservative thinking and fear of fresh ideas hinder progress. There is even a concept called the “Semmelweis reflex”—the automatic rejection of new knowledge simply because it contradicts established norms. In the case of the doctor from Vienna, this reflex cost many lives. His tragic fate (he ended his days in an asylum for the insane, never seeing recognition) shows the price society pays for stubborn dogmas.

Unfortunately, such fear of the new is not a relic of the past. Even today, dogmas and bureaucracy often stand like a concrete wall in the path of innovation. Examples are not hard to find: the denial that Helicobacter pylori bacteria cause stomach ulcers rather than stress and spicy food; the denial of the greater safety of NPPs compared to other power generation technologies; the denial of the benefits of psilocybin in treating PTSD and depression; the denial of a patient’s right to try experimental treatment.

Stories like the one that happened to Semmelweis show that progress is born from the freedom to think differently. New ideas often look frightening or heretical to those accustomed to old paradigms. Of course, skepticism is a healthy quality, but blinded dogmatism is dangerous. It can make rational people reject facts that are literally right in front of them (in Semmelweis’s case, literally on unwashed hands). Every new hypothesis deserves a fair test, not immediate execution just because it contradicts textbooks.

Remembering Doctor Semmelweis, one should ask: is there someone like that truth-teller among us today, whose ideas are ahead of their time but are drowning in the swamp of bureaucracy and prejudice? History teaches us to be bolder and to open the door to the new, even if it means facing rejection. After all, it is the freedom to seek truth and challenge dogmas that ultimately drives humanity forward.

Voluntarist, Bitarch