The Semmelweis Reflex: Why May We Be Wrong?

 March 18, 2012

Not long ago I was thrilled by this story of a Hungarian doctor who lived in the heat of the scientific revolution and seemed to have gone so far ahead of his time that it destroyed his life.

His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, he was 29 when in 1847 he began his work as an assistant to the professor of the maternity clinic at the Vienna General Hospital in Austria (Benedek 1983). Just at the time there was a sharp rise in death rates among midwives as well as female patients right after giving birth. The nature of what was called puerperal, or childbed fever was attributed to very specific causes that, as it was believed, varied uniquely from case to case and could not be explained by a universal theory since every human being is unique.

Semmelweis was the only physician to propose that all the cases went down to one cause – the lack of cleanliness leading to the accumulation of cadaverous particles on one’s hands and causing contamination of a person who comes in contact with them (Benedek 1983). He observed that many doctors were alternating the delivery of babies with performing autopsies in post-mortem examinations. Ultimately, he suggested that the doctors and midwives simply wash their hands in chlorine lime solutions before each procedure (Hanninen 1983:370).

Although the results were immediate (the mortality rates dropped by 90% within months) Semmelweis soon had faced fierce opposition on the part of the major medical community as the very idea of causing death by a simple touch was at the time perceived similarly to witchcraft and sorcery! Soon he lost his job at the clinic, though for political reasons, and moved back to Hungary where he wrote down his hypotheses in his book Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever (1859).

To understand such fierce reaction from doctors it is important to look back at the time when this was happening. The early 19th century saw the blossoming of the industrial revolution, with the shift of the scientific paradigm from the idealistic to the mechanical worldview established by Isaac Newton. The world had begun to be viewed as a gigantic mechanism whose capstone was PHYSICAL FORCE, which implied that the extent of physical damage could only be measured in physical units. 

Simultaneously, the newly-formed scientific society had begun to move away from the medieval interpretations and practices of curing diseases. With the triumph of reason methods such as herbs, health potions, sorcery along with prayer, sprinkling of holy water were now deemed as irrational and soon became tabooed by materialists. Inevitably, those who practiced such methods were ridiculed. So was Semmelweis who in the eyes of his contemporaries, all medical intellectuals and renowned practitioners, was reverting to medieval times. He was criticized, mocked and harassed by the medical community. Moreover, as K. Carter notes, some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands; they felt that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean (Carter 2005).

So it wasn’t until several decades later that Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory that led to the establishing of bacteriology as a science and acquitted Semmelweis in the eyes of the scientific community. Unfortunately, Semmelweis wasn’t able to enjoy the celebration of his ideas. After two weeks in the mental asylum where he had been placed at the urging of his counterparts who believed him to have lost his mind he allegedly died of septicaemia, the very disease he had fought for so long. According to other reports, he was murdered by the guards.

There is no doubt that the Enlightment era advanced the world a great deal: steam engine, lever, gear wheel, thermodynamics laws – all this was great. However, these inventions do not apply to everything there is. Battling one superstition those scientists fell into another, not realizing that human organism is a way more complicated structure then they thought. Now we live in a materialistic humanistic society where scientists believe that G-d is a superstition, not only He but many other things such as marriage, premarital purity and physical abstention. But can it turn out that we are killing a woman in labor with our unclean hands? While for many people it’s not a question anymore, others should stop for a moment and seriously ask themselves: may we be wrong?

Read also: 

Medical History: Semmelweis and the Great Handwashing Mystery

How to admire a woman's beauty without lust?

Is the only way to deal with lust is by locking yourself away or learning to live blindfolded or is it possible to enjoy feminine beauty without lusting after it?  Well, you bet it is! Otherwise there would be no beauty. Beauty is meant to be admired. 

Sadly however, the notions of beauty and admiration have been misinterpreted. Beauty is now spoken of in terms of physical features rather than something else, and admiration is not imagined without a subsequent desire to get hold of the admiree.

And that’s where the problem lies: people have forgotten how to adore beautiful things without regrets that they don’t have them. Therefore for some it is just the matter of how low you can go in suppressing your conscience to get what you want. Voices echo in their heads convincing them that they must have it. Ultimately, when they do they often see that their expectations have been ruined.

There was a story of one of King David’s sons that illustrates this well enough. His name was Amnon and he had happened to be infatuated with his cousin Tamar. Here’s what we read in the book of Samuel: 

“Amnon fell in love with Tamar, the beautiful sister of Absalom son of David. Amnon became so obsessed with his sister Tamar that he made himself ill. She was a virgin, and it seemed impossible for him to do anything to her.” 

Then he tricked her into his room, but after it was over he “hated her with intense hatred” and turned her out. Well, it ended all too bad for him.

Now we have clues that can help us avoid doing the same. Check your feelings at the moment you see a beautiful girl. Here’s a few signs:

LUST:

• You feel somewhat uncomfortable and frustrated as if you were failing to live up to something
• You look more than once at her body rather than at her face
• If you do look at her face you try to catch her look to get her attention
• If you unintentionally caught a glimpse of her exposed body parts you look longer than to make sure there are no poisonous snakes on them
• You imagine her as your girl or your wife or in an indecent setting
• If you see her walking by you look at her for any other purpose than to ask for directions or to avoid running into her
• If you do ask for directions you know you don’t need them. This is cheating.

TRUE ADMIRATION:

• You feel calm, undisturbed and not weighted down
• You feel happy for the person who has or will have her as his wife
• In your heart you wish her only the best and pray for her
• When you see her you don’t rush to make  yourself known to her
• You prefer to look away instead of looking at her with impurity
• You look beyond her physical appearance discerning her inner beauty
• You think of the One who Created her and praise Him
• Finally, all this takes no longer than a second

If you tried but couldn’t change your attitude to beauty and admiration, the first step towards change is to admit your weakness before G-d and to someone you know will tell you the truth rather than what you want to hear. Then pray in the name of Yeshua asking G-d to help you. If necessary, dedicate a day to fasting during which read the Scriptures and pray. The truth will be on your side.

Watch music video by Philadelphia:

Philadelphia: Statement of Fact

The 'Problem' of Unequal Distribution of Wealth

- If America used the money it spends on weapons to help African people, they wouldn't be dying of starvation.

- Oh I agree. They would be dying of obesity.

Click here for information to support discussion: 

A Detailed Look at Global Wealth Distribution

Harry Potter, Power & Knowledge

I had a curious dream the other night.

I was in a room that looked like an English pub and a library all in one, with people around. Some guys in there began to challenge me to a fight. The goal of this fight was to push each other off a table. I beat all of them. But then appeared a boy that looked like Harry Potter: with a baby-face and glasses, a sweater over a white-collar shirt. His face actually was like Harry Potter’s… or Daniel Radcliff’s. He also challenged me, which surprised me because he was apparently feeble and immature. However, I accepted the challenge and we met some time later at the same place. I wondered how he was going to beat me, but then I saw him take out dozens of books and stack them on the table until there was a large wall of books in front of me. Then I realized that he meant a different kind of fight, not physical but a BRAIN FIGHT.

I even remember my thoughts at that moment: there is more to life than breaking your back to gain physical strength or make a living. There is knowledge. This is the knowledge of the Truth that “sets us free”. How can we be free unless we know we are not, and if we do, we do not know how? And how can we know unless someone instructs us? Right now as I am writing these lines I have made a decision that has set me free and has filled me with peace that I would not achieve had I decided differently. This decision would be unattainable without me knowing the Truth. My dear and amazing God Jesus Christ who lives in me by His Holy Spirit has taught me right from wrong and how to become strong to choose what is right. I am forever grateful to Him for the knowledge and the strength. When the mankind agreed to destroy the very concept of deity they immediately faced numerous voids that their new atheistic worldview was failing to fill, so they set off for the mission to fill the gaps at any cost. Hence the social theory of conscience which insists on people’s awareness of good and bad being the result of external brainwash, not of an innate pattern.

The world is thousand times more complex and fascinating than it is interpreted by mainstream education. If only we let our knowledge head the right way we will discover within our planet indescribable new worlds to roam, learn and study. Travels to distant galaxies will be irrelevant when people find that Earth alone hides in itself enough to get them busy for centuries to come. But however enormous and different these worlds might be they will remain part of God’s splendid creation.

A good professor is like good wine - the older, the better.

by Vasilio Freiman. March 9, 2012

Whatever walk of life you are from you will someday face the day of retirement, it's just that for some people it comes rather late. I'm talking about intellectuals. By such I mean not only people commited to science, but also those who dedicated their life to discovering the wisdom of the Only God and His creation. These people's mind will never become stagnant because of the lack of brain work. It remains bright and clear when they get old, and while at that age they can no longer afford physical work their mind keeps up the pace.

Every business has its own timing of payoff, some businesses pay off quickly and some take time before you get a return on your investment. Some people don't want to wait so they invest in quick-return businesses to enjoy life while they are young. Such people buy cool clothes and cars with their parents' money, go to parties, play for college teams, work out heavily and date beautiful girls. Then you should look at many of them when they reach 40. Other people don't have anything of the abovementioned, they prefer reading and learning to partying and dating. This type of investment has a delayed return, sometimes it takes years to get your first cent (if you are hoping to follow in Mark Zuckenberg's footsteps keep in mind that such instances are exceptions to the rule). Sometimes it doesn't pay off until you get old, however by then you are wise enough to accept the expected profit in other than the monetary form. And while many at 65 struggle with the fear of own uselesness to the society your life just starts at that age. In the countries where the job of a teacher is low-paid this is especially relevant: it's a tough choice to be poor when you are young but to get enriched when you are old, constantly learning, thinking and praying, increasing your value like good wine.

Holographic movies: Exit Surface, Enter Space

by Vasilio Freiman, March 4, 2012

Since we stepped into the second decade of the third millenium the excitement about the future of technology has grown along with the expetations cherished by various groups to push their liberties to new boundaries or to take down any boundaries. This has been the main trend in the western civilization triggered by the Enlightment philosophy and dragged around by hippies. The word freedom has been elevated to the point that life without freedom is now considered empty or at least of junk-food quality.

It seems like the pursuit of freedom could not help affecting some of the most profitable industries – computer technologies  and movies – leading to a steady rise in video-games production and an outburst of “three-dee” movies that have flooded the market in the last years. Like offer – like demand, which means people want something that they hope will satisfy them, where ‘something’ equals freedom to do whatever you want with economy and without much aftermath, so video games and 3D movies have turned out to be the pocket that freedom-seekers can reach their hands into and grab it. In this instance James Cameron’s ambitious $230-million venture about blue goblins taking a stand for their rights was not an accident. Avatar was planned to become a turning point in the film industry and to mark a complete takeover of 3D movies. Eric Hedegard of Rolling Stone wrote in January of 2010 that “the burden of reviving Hollywood [had rested] on the shoulders of James Cameron” and it looks like it was rather heavy. In fact, they did make a turn but they tried too hard, so it turned out to be a 360 turn. The 21^st century requires something greater than that, and I’m not talking about 3D – there is nothing wrong with it, – but what is wrong is that there is still no real 3D. Why? Because it is the same old flat screen with a people eating staring in the same direction, with the only difference that these people are now wearing glasses that create a certain illusion of space tentatively called 3D. The trick is that it is just an illusion created by manipulating our visual perception. The eyes are sending impulses to the brain making us perceive flat non-material images on the wall as real (pardon my French). Although it does give us some dose of amusement the awareness that it is only a picture ruins the whole fun.

We need something greater than the good old flat screen to which the industrial generation of ours became so addicted when people first saw a train heading towards them from inside a wall and screamed in excitement like junior-high kids. From then on the eye structure of humans had begun to transform becoming dominant over other senses. The amazing era of cinema was preceded not only by photography but also, on a more simple level, by the art of watching. There were people in Europe who were learning to watch things even before first films appeared. Those people were dubbed flaneurs. They would walk on the streets of Paris doing basically nothing but looking for something interesting to see. Once they would find it, which could be a fire, a street accident or arrest, they would take a spot aside the scene, usually at a distance far enough to be able to see the big picture and would watch the event leaning against a wall, arms folded, while other people merely would crowd around the scene as close as they could.

The occupation of millions of people known today as movie-watching is what is inherited considerably from flaneurs, therefore the invention of the motion picture at that time was a response to the desire of many people to observe things from the side without physical participation. Probably cinema would not have become so popular weren’t there been demand for watching others cry, die, suffer or become rich.

It appears more clearly that today we are on the verge of big changes in technology. It means that if film industry is willing to survive in the long run it should be willing to keep up with technological development. In fact, I believe Hollywood can make a leap forward instead of taking tiny steps if they begin to think about never-seen-before techninques of art expression. What I state here is that the technology of light projections onto a flat screen has steadily been moving toward its obsoleteness. The contemporary 3D and 4D formats are only variations within the same theme. What we need is to apply a genuinely ground-breaking technology, that is, real 3D projections that would be independent of a surface to be projected onto, but will require only cubic space. The picture will simply “hang” in the air. All the previous forms of picture art needed a surface – a canvas, a photo-paper or a wall, which offered only one angle of watching, the one that an artist, a photographer or a director of photography chose. Some companies like Walt Disney have already experimented with available technologies and built a different type of a movie theater in which instead of one screen there were several flat screens put together and set around the audience in a semi-circle creating a 180 panoramic view. To shoot a film of such panoramic format a company called CicleVision located in Canada had built special cameras used for shooting such films as America the Beautiful that had managed to divert critics’ attention from its sophisticated technology to its ethnic inequality issues. However, the same flat surface was still there, but now it was around you.

Well, the idea is of course not new, especially if we remember Star Wars where we see the characters in the film getting in touch with each other running a holographic video of someone on the other end of the line. While George Lucas had showed this feature in the film referring to a far-away future when such device should be available for mass use, in fact it is not quite that far ahead. For example, some years ago I got my picture taken using laser scanning and placed inside a glass cube, so you can look at it at all angles. Since the 90s scientists have been developing 3D scanners that can copy and recreate material objects in the matters of minutes using liquid plastic and metal. Then I thought that if a steady 3D picture was so easy to make, the same thing could be done in motion and placed inside a sphere or a cylinder and seats could be set around it to watch it.

This new technology that is going to take over in the nearest two or three decades is called holographic imaging. The audience will be actually moving around the picture having a desirable angle to watch the film at instead of enjoying the only one offered by a cameraman. It seems like holographic movies are the next generation of entertainment that will inevitably make flat screens obsolete. The size of a screen will no longer be measured in squares but in cubes. But God knows what’s in store for us years from now, maybe tactile material objects that are pre-produced and recorded as in a video. That will not be surprising either because such has been the trend in the last years in regard to people’s aspiration to experience things by physical contact rather then by observation. To better undestand what I mean, go to a museum and watch people reach out their hands to the artifacts, or come up to a stuffed figure of an animal you have never seen before. Someday the demand will receive its supply. The sky is the limit.
Musion Hologram Technology 

The Side Effects Of Humanism

                                                              The side-effects of Humanism           Cartoon by V. Freiman

If we examine what stands behind the Human Rights movement we will find ourselves as far back as in the 18th century when humans had begun to think of themselves as super-creatures surpassing in their intelligence horses, dogs, bushes and other surrounding objects. Simultaneously, they began to feel infringed by the abovementioned individuals and started revolutions to establish equal rights for all. Today it has become normal to spend time proving one's rights and liberties as a human. However, whether we like it or not, there are things more relevant than our rights, like taking care of what is going to happen to us after we check out. So it may someday turn out that all these years we have been wasting time. My advice: get a life!

Hi,

Welcome to my blog dedicated to the brightest thoughts and ideas on Life itself born in the heads of famous and unknown but bright-minded people both late and alive. Here you will find for yourself all the sizzling things to debate, criticize, argue with, deny, destroy rhetorically, in other words, to sneer at to your full pleasure and maybe try to win a debate with me. 

Or you will find answers to the questions that you have been baffled by. If so, make sure to have your mind open. You'll get it.