Polarization is a Wound of the Collective Body
Semmelweis’s theory did not simply challenge the prevailing medical
theories about the causes of childbed fever; it challenged a deeply
held identity structure of the medical establishment. While there
were several theories about childbed fever—it was a unique disease
like smallpox, it was the result of a miasma, it was the result of
an imbalance in the four humors of the body—what was common among
these disparate theories was a simple but ultimately lethal assumption:
Whatever was causing childbed fever, it was not the doctors who were
at fault. They were committed healers doing everything they could
for their patients. They grieved with each mother’s death. Something
mysterious, beyond human comprehension and responsibility, must be
at work. To accept Semmelweis’s theory would require long-practicing
obstetricians to acknowledge that, however unwittingly, they had
been the instrument of their patients’ deaths.
We are back in Helm,
without the humor: The doctors saw themselves as committed professionals,
as caring healers; it was unfathomable to them that they could be
the cause of their patients’ deaths. Therefore, anyone who would
suggest such a thing must be (fill in the blank): deluded, misguided,
naïve, dangerous, treacherous, evil. Semmelweis was called all of
these things and more.
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