Contemporary Reaction To Ignaz Semmelweis - Epistemological Relevance

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".

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", 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".

(For an example of an earlier dead-end speculative theory that had halted scientific development, see phlogiston).