I wrote some time back on how one often comes across a new word and then it appears again. In a similar vein have you heard of Ignaz Semmelweis?
I hadn’t, until recently, and then two people gave me books for my birthday that featured him. Semmelweis lived in the 1800s and was puzzled why the cases of women falling ill and dying whilst in hospital to give birth were much higher when the medical students and doctors tended to them than when midwives did it. You can read the full story elsewhere but he came to the conclusion that it was connected with the fact that the first group also handled dead bodies. He prescribed basic measures such as hand washing that today are taken for granted. At the time he was ridiculed and disbelieved by many, not until Pasteur showed the existence of germs did people realise why he was right.
The two books were both very good, only really using Semmelweis as examples in a larger picture. The first was called Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute. Now I don’t know how you’d feel if you were given a book with that title by a direct report. I was a bit miffed at first. I shouldn’t have been, it’s an excellent book on how we can’t often see a problem when the problem is, and is hidden by, self-deceit. I can recommend it to anyone, not just those aspiring to leadership.
The second book was Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. This book really shows how science is misrepresented in the media as well as how many alternative therapies, homeopathy and the likes of nutritionism advocated by Gillian McKeith for example, are not in anyway based on open scientific research. By open I mean that the studies’ methods and raw data are open to inspection and by scientific I mean that there are control groups and other standard research techniques. It’s a great read and you’ll look at science journalism in a new light.
For those of you interested in new words I can suggest iatrogenic, a word Semmelweis could have done with.
