Hello this is the second podcast in our series: “Facing Death with Joyful Hope”

This one I’m calling “Truth gets Rejected because Lies are Accepted”.

 

In the last podcast I promised to tell you how you could face death with joyful hope.

But there’s a problem, because if I told you the truth, you probably wouldn’t believe me.  You might say,

“Well, why wouldn’t I believe you? I’d really like to know!  This sounds exciting to me!”

There are so many lies that are told, that people believe them, and so that they cannot see the truth.   And that actually could be you! If I speak the truth, you probably won’t believe me.  You’d probably reject what I say because of the lies that you have been taught.

So I’m not going to explain it to you right now; that will come later when you understand why I have reason to believe it.  So, before telling you the truth, I want to tell you a true story which helps you to understand why you would not believe me.

Do you really want to know the truth? Then stick with me because we need to sort out some of these lies first.

—————————-

Back in the 1800s there was a doctor, a scientist, called Dr Ignaz  Semmelweis who discovered the truth about how to stop disease spreading. He was a Hungarian, but he worked mostly in Austria.

 

In the hospital where he worked there were two maternity units, one led by the doctors, another led by nurses. At that time, in maternity units, fever killed a lot of ladies; and it was a fever that had an unknown cause. They didn’t know where it came from – what caused it.

In the doctor-led unit, 10% of the ladies died, whereas in the nurse-led unit 4% of the ladies died.  So that means that, for every hundred pregnant ladies that came in the nurses’ unit, they would need on average 4 coffins, but, in the doctors’ unit, for every hundred pregnant ladies they would need 10 coffins!  10 died – and this was normal! There’s a graph which shows this on Wikipedia which you can see, and it shows that this was consistent year after year.  It wasn’t the same every year but it was consistently higher in the doctors’ units than in the nurses’ units.

Doctor Semmelweis said, “Why is that?”

He was thinking scientifically.  He said, “Surely that could not just be by chance, could it?  There must be something to cause what’s different between them.  What is the difference between the two units?”

He studied the two units, and he noticed that the only difference he could see was that when the nurses came into work, they went straight into the wards, whereas, when the doctors came to work in the morning, they first checked the bodies of those who had died before they went on to the wards.

Then one day he had a clue; he had a doctor friend who was accidentally poked with a scalpel during the post mortem examination of a lady who had died of this fever.  A short time later the friend got sick and died, and the friend’s autopsy showed that he had died of the same type of infection as the woman!

“Oh!!!  What did that mean?  Could that mean anything?”

And he wondered,  “Could this be connected with the extra deaths?”  Well… It didn’t fit any of the things he’d been taught in medical school and he’d studied for years…

So he thought, “ I wonder… Are the doctors actually transferring a sickness from the dead bodies to these expectant mothers? “

Well, it’s obvious to us now, isn’t it? But that was a brand new idea to him; It didn’t fit any of the theories of disease that he’d ever been taught.

So he went out on a limb and he formulated a “hypothesis”.  Well, scientists use this word, and it’s just the Greek word for an id ea.  And the hypothesis was: “Doctors are transferring sickness from dead bodies.”  So then he thought, “If that’s the case, maybe I could stop the transfer.”

“Well, how could I stop the transfer from the dead bodies to the ladies in the wards?”

At that time in the hospitals they used a form of bleach as a deodorant to kill the smells, and he thought,
“Well I wonder if this might help, to wash our hands with it after we checked the dead bodies and before going on the rounds of the wards?”

Well, that was a strange idea to him, but anything is worth trying, so he decided to try it out.  So after they checked the dead bodies, they washed their hands with a bleach solution before they went on to the ward rounds

Well, what do you think happened? There was a HUGE difference! You can see the chart on Wikipedia which shows this, that on the right-hand side of the chart, after they started using the bleach, there were many fewer deaths, whereas before that there were lots.

He had it all documented.  So then he added the idea of washing the instruments in a bleach solution as well.  Well, after that, how many coffins did he need?

For every hundred pregnant ladies who came in, before using a bleach solution, they needed ten coffins.   After he started using bleach solution and using it on the instruments, he needed one!

So that meant that 90% of the deaths were actually caused by contamination from the doctors and maybe the instruments, so, simply using a bleach solution stopped the cause of most of the deaths! So that meant that by their lack of hygiene, the doctors were killing nine out of the 10 ladies that were dying.  Isn’t that something?

 

Well, that was an incredible discovery! He was a scientist, and His scientific mind with careful research and recording got a great answer!  Well you might ask the question, “Did he get a Nobel Prize for medicine? (Not that there were any Nobel prizes then!)

But what would the reaction be? How did fellow doctors and scientists react? Did they accept his advice and copy his example? Obviously this was a wonderful discovery, wasn’t it? Obviously they thought the same didn’t they? Or did they actually reject his advice and ignore his example?

Well … “They wouldn’t do that, would they?  We know very well this is just plain basic hygiene.”

Actually what happened was, that they laughed him to scorn!  They thought this was an absolutely ridiculous idea, and, although he was showing that he was saving lives, they totally rejected what he was telling them.!

You might say, “Oh! Really?”
Yes, really! They blocked his career.  Yes, really!

The fact is that he spoke the truth, he had the truth, but others didn’t believe him.

Why didn’t they believe him? Because they believed the lies that they had been taught in medical school, which made them laugh at the truth. You see, the doctors really had no idea of the truth about how diseases were spread – no idea at all.

Now in a similar way, I want to share the truth with you about how you can face death with joyful hope, but I am afraid that you may reject the truth that I speak because of the accepted fiction which is going around, because of the lies which are going around. So that is why I’m telling you this story.

And in the next podcast I want to tell you why he was rejected.  And I will also have a challenging question for you.

This is a bit of a journey, but on this journey I can promise you that you can know how you can face death with joyful hope, and I hope you will join me in the next podcast.