Richard Shotton

speaker

1,228 appearances 5 recordings 4 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 27 Jun

Richard Shotton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

They don't say what they think and they don't do what they say.

So I think the best entrepreneurs, the best ad people have known this for a long while.

But the problem is the average advertiser finds it easy to run a survey and then it sends them off in the wrong direction.

Michael and I were looking at ways to end the book, and I came across this story of Semmelweis.

And so if people haven't heard of it, 1840s, he is a doctor in Vienna.

kind of reasonably recently trained in the 1840s.

And he's shocked when he arrives at the hospital at the proportion of women who die in childbirth.

Now, it's astronomical.

Some of the wards, you would probably be better playing Russian roulette.

You've got 10%, 15% of people dying in labor.

Spends an awful lot of time trying to work out why this is.

And one of his findings is that the wards that are run by midwives tend to have a much better survival rate than the wards that are run by doctors.

And one of the things that the doctors do differently from nurses is that they will do autopsies.

So they will come straight from cutting up a body to then deliver a baby.

And Semmelweis wonders if they are bringing what he calls cadaverous particles to the mum-to-be.

So he starts getting doctors to wash their hands in chlorine.

Now, they've got to scrub them, in his words, until the stench of kind of putrid decay has gone.

They have to scrub their hands clean, and then they can help with labor.

And the death rate plummets.

It goes from 10%, 12% to 3%.

Showing 821–840 of 1,228 · page 42 of 62