Please Don’t Cringe!!!

Don’t cringe!

Please!

We promise we’ll tell you when to cringe.

The Vienna General Hospital was one of the largest in the world; its massive maternity unit was divided into two wards – one for male doctors and their male students and one for female midwives and their female students. Between 1840 and 1846, the maternal mortality rate from so-called “childbed fever” - today’s streptococcal infection - was 36.2 per 1000 births on the midwives’ unit and 98.4 per 1000 births for the male doctors’ ward - almost three times higher.

Then, in 1847, Jacob Kolletschka developed a fatal infection after cutting his finger during an autopsy. His colleague, Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis began to wonder whether a similar infection could be happening in the doctors’ unit.

Semmelweis recognized that the men often went directly from performing autopsies to examining women and theorized – incorrectly – that Kolletchka died because “cadaveric matter” entered his body through his wound and that women might be dying because the same cadaveric – decomposing animal - matter was transferred to them in the examination process.

From autopsy to examining a patient without washing!?!.

Now you can cringe!

Despite his careful notes and scrupulously maintained data demonstrating the success that resulted from hand-washing, Semmelweis’ theory that dirt particles under the fingernails and on the skin could cause death was regarded as “Catholic superstition.” His colleagues seriously argued that their patents’ deaths were caused by priests displaying large consecrated hosts – a final blessing to the dying - as they passed through the maternity ward corridors to the accompaniment of a sounding bell – “the psychological terror of hearing the bell – so even if you’re not actually dying, you just hear the bell, you know it could be your time,” according to Purdue University professor Dana Tulodziecki, who has written about Semmelweis.

For a number of reasons – including his rambling writing style and the idea that he was essentially accusing his fellow physicians of causing the deaths of their patients, Semmelweis’ theory didn’t win wide acceptance. "A doctor is a gentleman, and a gentleman's hands are always clean," responded the American obstetrician Charles Delucena Meigs, despite all evidence to the contrary. (Meigs also opposed obstetric anesthesia and believed “the Divinity has ordained us to enjoy or to suffer.”)

Semmelweis, began mandating that doctors wash their hands with chlorinated lime after autopsies and the mortality rate in their units dropped to almost the same level as in the midwives’ ward. Nonetheless, he was professionally attacked and ridiculed by his scientific colleagues, denied tenure and eventually driven into an insane asylum, where he was beaten to death.

Serving during the Crimean War (1853-1856), the British nurse Florence Nightingale argued, “Every nurse ought to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day.”

In 1867, the forty-year-old Joseph Lister took up the cause, using a spray made of carbolic acid on wounds, dressings and surgical tools and washing his hands. The acid killed the germs before they had a chance to cause infection, and the hand-washing kept new germs from being introduced.

Prior to Lister’s use of these disinfecting procedures, J.E. Erichsen, a future president of the Royal College of Surgeons, argued “The abdomen, chest and brain will forever be closed to operations by a wise and humane surgeon.”

Lister’s outcome: Wounded limbs “which would be unhesitatingly condemned to amputation” because of the probability of infection “may be retained with confidence of the best results”; wounds could heal cleanly and hospitals became healthier. Carbolic acid was exchanged for other antiseptics by 1885.

During the roughly thirty years between Semmelweis and Lister, maternal and surgical deathrates dropped dramatically and a new era of Science reigned in medicine.

Galileo, a student of velocity, the principle of relativity, applied sciences and technology, championed Copernican heliocentrism and was brought before the Inquisition for the first time in 1615 on charges that he was attempting to reinterpret the Bible, a violation of the Council of Trent and dangerously close to Protestantism. He was hauled before the Inquisition again in 1632-1633 and threatened with torture, found “vehemently suspect of heresy” and required to “abjure, curse and detest” his opinion that the earth revolves around the sun. [Legend has it that, as he left the final hearing, he muttered “And yet it moves.”] He spent the last decade of his life under house arrest.

Three-hundred-and-fifty-nine years after the Inquisition’s verdict – on October 31,1992, Pope John Paul II officially declared that Galileo was right. There are two realms of knowledge, the Pope acknowledged, “one which has its source in Revelation and one which reason can discover by its own power.” These realms, he said, are distinct but should not be considered opposite.

Charles Darwin felt the antipathy of Christian churches and denominations in the hullabaloo that followed his On the Origin of Species, and, while some denominations still refuse to recognize the value of his insights, one-hundred-and-fifty years after the publication of his milestone work, the Anglican and Roman Churches Churches honored his contributions to Science and Faith.

In the 2008 essay “Good Religion Needs Good Science,” the Rev. Dr. Malcolm Brown, Director of Mission and Public Affairs for the Church of England, recognized that the Church owed Darwin an apology for misunderstanding his theory of evolution and making errors in its reaction. Brown’s essay addressed the naturalist, geologist and biologist: “Charles Darwin – 200 years from your birth (1809) the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still… We try to practice the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope to make amends. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests. Good religion needs to work constructively with good science – and I dare to suggest that the opposite may be true as well.

“People, and institutions make mistakes and Christian people and churches are no exception. When a big idea emerges which changes the way people look at the world, it’s easy to feel that every old idea, every certainty is under attack and then to do battle with the new insights. The church made that mistake with Galileo’s astronomy, and has since realized its error. Some Church people did it again in the 1860s with Darwin’s theory of natural selection…

“It is hard to avoid the thought that the reaction against Darwin was largely based on what we would now call the ‘yuk factor’ – an emotional not an intellectual response.

Now, into the circular firing squad of genetics and embryology, LGBT issues, biblical literalism and scientific/exegetical understands of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures comes England’s Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research with its May 2021 Academic Statement on the Ethic of Free and Faithful Same-Sex Relationships. Signed by more than sixty (and the number continues to grow) academics, it opens by noting the “revolutionary” Copernican and Darwinian “epochal challenges” to Christian theology.

The authors declare,

“In the twentieth century, scientific research brought about a third epochal revolution, which no longer concerned the space of the universe, nor the history of humankind, but our most intimate dimension: sexuality. The shift in thinking now involves the construction and understanding of the persons themselves, their identity and dignity as sexual beings marked by a diversity of sexual orientations. Facing this new challenge is probably even more difficult than the two previous revolutions, because it questions something central to being human: namely, being both an ‘individual’ and ‘in relationships with others.’”

Looking to the future, they also offer genuine hope:

“…the contradiction between today’s understanding of human sexuality and the biblical message is only apparently insurmountable. The Word of God is in fact open to and prepared to accept the gifts of human reason regarding sexuality in general and same-sex sexual orientation in particular. The Church, therefore, is called once again to become aware of this openness of the revealed Word, a Word that is not afraid of the intelligibility and rationality of human knowledge.”

At the same time, the authors frame the need for a faithful and filled-with-faith science-based approach to the challenge of this third epoch:

One understands, therefore, the urgency of a serious and objective confrontation by the Church with the intelligibility of sexual orientation. Same-sex sexual orientation, like heterosexual orientation, is not a ‘tendency’, the result of an individual’s choice, of some defect or unnatural factor. Rather, same-sex sexual orientation is the natural capacity for a deep emotional, affective and sexual attraction towards, and intimate and sexual relationships with, individuals of the same sex. Today there is no longer any doubt that the variety of sexual orientations is now much more than a scientific hypothesis, and as such it demands to be taken seriously by theological reflection.

Today, suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people ages ten to twenty-four years old and LGBT youth seriously contemplate suicide at almost three times the rate for heterosexual youth and are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to their straight peers and their attempts are almost five times as likely to require medical treatments. LGB young people who come from highly rejecting families are 8.4 times as likely to have attempted suicide as their LGB peers who reported no or low levels of family rejection.

The bullying of LGBT youth, on-going legislative efforts – whatever the motivation – that have the ultimate effect of discriminating against any element of our youth, including LGBT young people, and the astounding rates of suicide among those who experience bullying and discrimination that can result in suicidal ideations and death demand that genuinely pro-life people of faith take seriously the challenges of this newest epochal challenge of faith and science.

We will continue to examine scientific and theological aspects of the Academic Statement in coming weeks. The entire statement can be found at https://www.wijngaardsinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/wijngaards_institute__academic_statement_same_sex_unions__2021.pdf

The Gift of Hospitality

Four Lives

Who We Are