E.W.Dijkstra Archive: On hygiene, intellectual and otherwise

Not my favorite kind of argument: (1) Show in detail how "the establishment" in some historical controversy was spectacularily wrong. (2) Use this as proof for the superiority of your own position in a completely unrelated modern debate.<p>There was a submission some time ago which used the same device to argue against global warming. Since "the powers that be" had been wrong in the case of Galileo, then <i>obviously</i> the mainstream belief in man-made climate change was the same kind of wrong-headed belief in unscientific dogma. I have seen the same kind of argument for Creationism - since science was wrong in the case of the ether and frenology, then obviously the theory of evolution is also wrong.

Does anyone have a source for the history related in the submitted article? I know routine aseptic precautions were opposed by quite a few doctors in the nineteenth century for quite a while, but I've never read anything about detailed reasons (other than convenience) given for not washing hands regularly or sterilizing instruments. How much of this is on the historical record, and how much of this is story-telling by Dijkstra, who was quite an able story-teller?

"...if sterilization of the knife really helped, everybody would be able to operate and that would be totally intolerable."<p>Crazy. What?<p>Humans never cease to amaze me.

And the resistance to these ideas continues to this day, seemingly unabated. The consequences are all around us, in our mailboxes.

A great man that knows how to put current issues in historical perspective. Yet, his case here doesn't rest so well: software hacking without a plan has generated good software, <i>after applying cleanup, refactoring, and what not.</i><p>A great read.