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Controversies in Internal Medicine
A New Feature in the ARCHIVES
Arch Intern Med. 2002;162:1441.
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When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.—William Hazlitt (1778-1830), British essayist
CONTROVERSY HAS PLAYED a pivotal role in the history of medicine. In 1553, Michael Servetus offered a revolutionary description of the circulation of blood into the heart after being mixed with air in the lungs. He was burned alive for heresy in Geneva in the same year, at the instigation of Calvin. Fortunately, not all controversies in medicine met with such a fate, but instead, ultimately led to major innovations in research and patient care.
Germ theory exemplifies this notion. In 1546, Girolamo Fracastoro proposed the earliest germ theory of disease, suggesting that epidemic diseases are caused by transferable seedlike entities. Three centuries later, Ignaz Semmelweis introduced the then controversial idea of hand washing as essential for the prevention of puerperal fever. In 1870, Louis Pasteur and . . . [Full Text of this Article]
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