YOUNG VOICE
Surgeons in jeans
Before the 1800s, operating rooms in hospitals posed a different picture compared to what we have right now. Surgeons weren’t clad in sterile gowns nor did they don rubber gloves. A pair of slacks matched with a homemade knitted sweatshirt, will do. They were comfortably wearing street clothes while cutting open a patient’s abdomen. They didn’t even care to wash their hands before starting the procedure. The operating room was as filthy like the public toilets we now find along busy highways. Operating instruments used weren’t sterilized. Imagine the same speculum used on one patient’s anus will be the same speculum used to view the deeper portions of your nose. With the presented scenario in the past, there is no surprise that around half of all surgery patients who survived the actual surgery typically died of infections that developed after the operation. Not many wondered on what could have caused the infections because most believe that tiny organisms such as bacteria and viruses couldn’t possibly defeat and weaken a larger organism like a human being.
It wasn’t after in the mid 1800’s when Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch proved through their experiments that much of the diseases and mortalities were caused by tiny organisms, we call as germs. Thus, the birth of the germ theory of disease. Koch and Pasteur isolated potential disease-bearing material into the bloodstream and compared the fermentation of milk to the degenerative effects of microorganisms to the human body. With the fact established, Joseph Lister forumlated antiseptic agents which he used during his surgeries, thereby decreasing the rate of surgical mortality.
What if Pasteur and Koch never validated and questioned what was before then an established fact and an accepted truth? I guess more people will die not because of their disease condition but because of the treatment given that predisposes them to an even greater risk for infection. Thank goodness they opted to question facts and remained eager skeptics. Learning and development are never stagnant states; they are dynamic processes that continue to evolve through time.
There are only two lessons in 5th grade science that remain intact in my already diluted brain. One is on photosynthesis; the process by which plants make their own food. Two is about validation or verification; it is vital to the efficient use of the scientific method. Understanding of reality can only take place if one have lived and verified the reason why such fact was considered true. Although it is established that water is indeed wet, you’ll only be able to understand why it was declared as wet, if you yourself will dip your hands into a pail of water.
Validation and verification can both confirm and contradict what was previously been true. Thus, I always stand by the belief that it isn’t any waste of time to try and prove even the most universal fact. I once thought that dark chocolates can’t give me the same satiety as plain chocolates would. I once thought that dark chocolates were bitter. I decided to taste one, and found out I began liking it more than plain chocolates because the validation of the dark chocolate gave birth to my new taste for bittersweets. Yes, if I haven’t dared to validate, to verify, to experience how eating dark chocolate was like, I would have been stagnant to my belief that they were not at all tasty. But even if I may not have enjoyed the dark chocolate’s bittersweet flavor, I would not consider the trial as futile and worthless since I have established the fact that it is indeed “not my taste”.
Certain events, a number of situations remained stagnant since people were blinded to the belief that these are irrevocable. We often attribute our third-world lifestyle to poverty. Is poverty really the cause of our retrogression? Have we validated that established reality so as to really convince ourselves? As far as my trivial yet untainted idealism can perceive, success stories of Cinderella-like rags-to-riches experiences are just at every nook and corner. These have proven that poverty doesn’t limit the once poor person’s potentials to become successful and well-furnished. It is fear of taking risks, the lack of courage to validate and explore beyond what society have established as facts that keeps one from progressing.
Yes, there are facts that we can’t anymore change. But to validate it that it is indeed final would all the more support the reason, and we ourselves begin to understand why it was declared true in the first place.
I am just glad Robert and Louis have decided to validate.
Because if they haven’t; we’ll all find ourselves operated by surgeons in jeans with an even less than 50/50 chance of being wheeled out of the operating room alive.
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