The womb after birth is basically an open wound, right? There's just a lot of abrasions inside the vaginal canal. And so of course, if you then stick your germy hands in that area, it's a huge risk for infection. Semmelweiss kind of realizes this, figures out that if he douse himself in carbolic acid, his mortality rate goes way down. The ed upis trap gave me a new way to think about that, because the normal story is like, gosh, those dumb surgeons.
When physician Walter Freeman died in 1972, he still believed that lobotomies were the best treatment for mental illness. A pioneer in the method, he was a deeply confident and charismatic man who eagerly spread the technique in America, long after the rise of alternative treatments that were less destructive. Listen as journalist Megan McArdle and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss what McArdle calls the "Oedipus Trap": mistakes that no one can live with, even if they were innocently made, and how admitting such mistakes to ourselves is nearly impossible. They also discuss the complexity of the credo, "follow the science."