Agilish

In the middle of the 19th century, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have saved thousands of lives. Instead, it cost him his career, his reputation, and ultimately his life. His story is one of the most important cautionary tales in the history of science — and one of the most relevant to anyone who has ever tried to challenge the status quo inside a large organization. The Discovery Semmelweis was working in a Vienna maternity ward in the 1840s when he noticed something deeply troubling. Women giving birth in the ward staffed by doctors and medical students were dying at a dramatically higher rate than women in the ward staffed by midwives. The difference was stark. The data was undeniable. He set out to understand why. What he found was that the doctors were moving directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies — without washing their hands. He hypothesized that something was being transferred from the cadavers to the patien...