Conclusion

And I will leave you with one last thought about surgeons and how we can learn from everybody.

Ignaz Ignaz Semmelweis was a general surgeon who did OBGYN and so on in Vienna General Hospital back in the 1800s.

And he noticed something very interesting. He noticed that if you take a look at this graph, this is the infant mortality rate when doctors delivered the babies. It was very, very high, up to 15, 16% infant mortality in 1842.

This was when midwives delivered. These were not doctors, they were midwives. And he said, why is it that the doctors kill more babies than midwives? You would think that a well-trained doctor would have a much higher success rate and a lower infection rate, when in fact, they had an infection rate that was much, much higher, 3 times higher when a doctor delivered the baby than when a midwife delivered the baby. And then,

So he said, I need to find out why this is the case.

So he would follow the doctors.

As they deliver the babies, and he would follow the midwives to see what they did differently. And he found this, that before the doctors delivered the baby, these doctors would sit around, they had nothing to do until the baby was delivered. So they said, I'm going to make good use of my time. I'm going to go to the morgue, and I'm going to take cadavers.

And I'm going to dissect to learn the anatomy. So they would go in there and they would take cadavers and they would dissect. And then when somebody would call them and say, Doctor, the baby is about to come, the doctor would rush to the delivery room and they would deliver the baby, but they didn't wash their hands.

So they went from dissecting on a dead person to delivering a live baby. And of course, some of those dead people had bacteria in them, so they coated their hands with bacteria, they delivered the baby, the babies got an infection, and the babies died. The midwives, obviously,

Did not dissect on cadavers. They waited on the patient, and when the woman was ready to deliver, they delivered the baby, their hands were clean, and so their infant mortality rate was much lower. So he said, what you must do is you must wash your hands before you deliver the babies because there's something on your skin that is causing these babies to die.

So just that simple observation allowed him to save babies' lives. And thanks to him, we now understand that you must wash your hands before you do any surgical procedures, before you deliver any babies. And what it teaches us is that rather than just doing exactly what our professors did and taught us for our benefit, it wasn't because they were trying to, you know, teach us the wrong things.

And it's not because we are bad that we teach the next generation of students and residents and fellows the wrong information, it's because we don't know any better.

That's why we have to make sure that they also learn that we are totally fallible. We make mistakes, and they have to check up on us to make sure that what we taught them is in fact good and correct information. Otherwise, they will continue to throw that sponge into the sink instead of into the garbage can where it belongs.

I thank you very much for your kind attention, and I would say go back to Einstein.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. We all must question everything that we've been taught. Thank you so much.