this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to observe microbes. Semmelweis deserves immense credit for trying to convince people to wash their hands, but he didn't observe microbes and believed in corpse particles. (⌐■_■)
Yeah. I was telling a fib for comedic effect. Semmelweis is actually a lot more impressive, to me, because he was able to deduce that something important was going on and what the solution was, without having any idea what the mechanism might be, simply from observing and following the data. He didn't need to know the details to know it was a problem; he just trusted the evidence without needing to have a narrative built up in his head to attach it to.
Also, once he realized it was killing people, he wouldn't shut up about it until they literally had to kill him to make him stop. That puts him over the line from good scientist to hero, to me.
Not arguing with that, but clearly people seem to believe you and think he discovered microbes, which he didn't. The truth is more impressive anyways, no?
I edited it to add a correction. I shouldn't fib for the sake of making a more entertaining link to the posting, maybe.
Maybe strikethrough the first part where you credit semmelweis with the discovery. And no, a convenient lie is never better than a complicated truth. It may seem harmless to you but you've just created misinformation and disseminated it to the public.
Cheers, comrade.