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Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that hand-washing with a solution of chlorinated lime reduced the incidence of fatal childbed fever tenfold in maternity institutions. However, the reaction of his contemporaries was not positive; his subsequent mental disintegration led to him being confined to an insane asylum, where he died in 1865. Semmelweis's critics claimed his findings lacked scientific reasoning. The failure of the nineteenth-century scientific community to recognize Semmelweis's findings, and the nature of the flawed critiques outlined below, helped advance a positivist epistemology, leading to the emergence of evidence-based medicine. ==Epistemological relevance== To a modern reader, Semmelweis's experimental evidence—that chlorine washings reduced childbed fever—seem obvious, and it may seem absurd that his claims were rejected on the grounds of purported lack of "scientific reasoning". His unpalatable observational evidence was only accepted when seemingly unrelated work by Louis Pasteur in Paris some two decades later offered a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis's observations: the germ theory of disease. As such, the Semmelweis story is often used in university courses with epistemology content, e.g. philosophy of science courses - demonstrating the virtues of empiricism or positivism and providing a historical account of which types of knowledge count as scientific (and thus accepted) knowledge, and which do not. It is an irony that Semmelweis's critics considered themselves positivists. They could not accept his ideas of "minuscule and largely invisible amounts of decaying organic matter" as a cause of every case of childbed fever. To them, "Semmelweis seemed to be reverting to the speculative theories of earlier decades that were so repugnant to his positivist contemporaries".〔Semmelweis 1861:45〕 The positivistic contempt for theoretical deliberations is evident in these two quotations. The first from the highly celebrated anatomist Rudolf Virchow who said, "Explorers of nature recognize no bugbears other than individuals who speculate"〔 From his Collected Papers on Scientific Medicine quoted in Semmelweis (1861):228 (translator Carter's note 75) 〕 , and Johann Lucas Boër said: "If every century could produce one physician as observant (as Hippocrates) rather than so many who are educated in theoretical systems, how much more would have been achieved for humanity and for animal life generally".〔 quoted in Semmelweis (1861):228 (translator Carter's note 76) 〕 (For an example of an earlier dead-end speculative theory that had halted scientific development, see phlogiston). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Contemporary reaction to Ignaz Semmelweis」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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