Matt Kaplan

it's very, very hard for them to stop believing in it.

But there's another side to this.

We were talking about the infrastructure underpinning pharmaceuticals and the medical community.

There is also the fact that these doctors at the hospitals who were supervising Semmelweis were very, very well established in the Austrian aristocracy.

They had it good, and they had a steady paycheck, and there was no reason for them to change anything

about the way they were working they were going to continue getting what they wanted regardless and actually shaking things up put them at risk of being identified as wait a minute you were using this crazy method before and now it's been proved wrong why were we paying you all this money so you you've got the power of long established narrative with selfish self-interest and then of course you also have the seasonality of these things which made sense

So they ran into a lot of walls trying to overturn it, and lots and lots of people beyond Semmelweis fought the good fight and lost.

Unfortunately, we've really not abandoned it.

And first of all, by the way, I want to emphasize actually, you know, while Pasteur behaved very badly, Galileo behaved, he was excellent at diplomacy and negotiation in a manner that saved a lot of his ideas.

And you don't have to backstab people to take unpopular ideas to get them across in the end.

He was a smart a-hole.

Unfortunately, the Pope was smart enough to work things out, but Galileo was clever and he dedicated that particular work, The Dialogue of Two Systems, to Ferdinando de' Medici, who was the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

And if there was anyone powerful enough to interfere with the Inquisition, it was Ferdinando de' Medici.

And it's amazing because Ferdinando de' Medici had Galileo

you know, on the payroll.

He was their chief scientist in Tuscany.

And similarly, Galileo was bosom buddies with the ambassador to Rome for Tuscany.

So when Galileo ultimately was called before the Inquisition, Ferdinando de' Medici interfered and ensured that Galileo was not tortured.

and ensured that Galileo was fed three meals a day made by the ambassador's wife.

And then when he was eventually taken over to the Inquisition and living there, he was in a five bedroom luxury apartment, a stone's throw from the Sistine Chapel.