Most people read them as ‘Paris in the spring’, ‘Once in a lifetime’, ‘Bird
in the hand’. But when they’re urged to look a little closer, sooner or
later they see the extra words, which their minds have selectively
ignored because they were already prepared to see the familiar expres-
sions. There are other examples, too, illustrating the same point: our
preconceptions prepare our minds to see what they want to see.Progress through analysisIt should come as no surprise, then, that analysing those concepts and
explanations that we’ve become accustomed to accept almost without
thinking, has been the source of the most remarkable breakthroughs
in almost all areas of thought. Indeed, the ruling paradigms that
structure our thinking in many areas do so even when it’s clear they’re
no longer effective in explaining what we see.
In 1847, if Ignaz Semmelweis had allowed his thinking to be ruled
by the prevailing paradigm of his time, he would have agreed with his
colleagues that the high death-rate from puerperal, or childbed, fever
among women in labour in the General Hospital in Vienna was due to
the prevailing miasma that hung over the hospital. This was the con-
ventional wisdom accepted by all the medical authorities, even though
it failed to explain why there were five times more deaths in the doctors’
division of the hospital than there were in the midwives’ division. So,
he wondered, how could a miasma settling over the whole hospital
have such a strong differentiated effect?
Divesting himself of all the assumptions handed down by previous
generations, he set about analysing the facts he had gathered by com-
paring the evidence in the two divisions. Unblinkered by any precon-
ceptions, eventually he came to realise that the fever was a blood
disorder made worse in the doctors’ division by him and his students
coming straight from the autopsy room to examine women in labour.
Without disinfecting themselves they were transferring into the blood-
stream of their female patients infections they had picked up from
examining the ‘cadaveric matter ’ in the autopsy room.
His refusal to accept the conventional wisdom of his day was to
cost Semmelweis his job, his career and the respect of his peers, but
it became the inspiration for the work of Louis Pasteur and the great
advances in bacteriology that were to come. Without his courage the
development of this field, considered by many to be the greatest single
advance in the history of medicine, might never have occurred.24 Interpretation of the QuestionHTW3 7/26/01 8:45 PM Page 24