Wash Your Hands of It
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Have you ever been to the doctor’s office and thought they were doing more harm than good?
In 1847, a Viennese doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something that should have been impossible.
At Vienna General Hospital, there were two maternity clinics. One was staffed by midwives. The other by doctors and medical students—the best-trained men in Europe. But in the doctors’ clinic, mothers were dying of childbed fever at nearly ten times the rate of the midwives’ clinic.
The experts were the problem.
Semmelweis figured out why. His students were…
The skinny
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