Nancy Isenberg, in the preface to her wonderful book on Aaron Burr, "Fallen Founder" remarks "history is not a bedtime story" to be read to impressionable children in a sanitized fashion.
History, of course, is a construct, like all memory, and it serves the purposes of the present, but if you are a real historian, you follow where the evidence takes you, among dusty letters and discarded newspapers nobody else reads. In her pursuit of Aaron Burr, she found much to admire, in fact, much more than she saw in Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton was a hothead, drama queen, determined to push his own cause, his own career, where Burr was in fact one of the first modern democratic statesmen, who compromised and listened, in the picture which emerges from Isenberg's reading.
Ask your neighbors, your kids if they've ever heard of Hamilton, Burr, Washington, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and likely they have. They read about these guys in school.
We teach the history of politics, government and war in our public schools, presumably because public schools are creatures of government.
But ask these same people if they have ever heard of Alexander Yersin, Sir Frederick Banting, Charles Best, or Semmelweiss or even Louis Pasteur, and you will likely get fewer affirmative answers.
Ask them who discovered AIDS, who identified the virus and who was involved in creating a treatment for AIDS and you'll get blank looks.
Who invented the key parts which allowed for the invention of the computer? What was Bill Gates's contribution to the computer revolution?
This sort of literacy is not widely imparted.
And the fact is, the stories of these giants of medicine and science are pretty gaudy.
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| Conqueror of the Black Plague |
Take Alexander Yersin, born in Switzerland, wandered into Louis Pasteur's lab in Paris, where he was taken under the wing of the great man and he did some useful and important work in creating a vaccine against tuberculosis, but he felt uninspired, restless and told Pasteur he needed to explore the world. Got on a ship to French Indochina, where he set up a rural clinic, where he was thrilled to hear tigers roaring in the jungle, when an outbreak of Black Plague broke out in Hong Kong, around 1898. Pasteur wires him and he hops the next boat to Hong Kong, where the British overlords have invited a world renown biologist and medical researcher from Japan to investigate.
Yersin watches the great man do autopsies on the victims and realizes they are not incising the buboes, the swollen lymph nodes, to look for the causative bacteria. Getting the boot from the arrogant Brits, Yersin sets up his own lab in a bamboo hut, and extracts the goo from the buboes, and identifies the pathogen. The famous Japanese guy misses it. Yersin writes up his findings, goes back to Vietnam where a Plague outbreak occurs the next year and he raises a vaccine to it and saves countless lives in Vietnam. He names the bug "Pastuella pestis" after Pasteur but Pasteur renames it, "Yersinia pestis." After centuries of Black Death and magical thinking about its cause, mankind now knows the true cause.
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| Banting and Best with Dog |
Or think of Banting and Best. Banting is a Canadian trauma surgeon whose private practice is failing and he reads about some experiments in dogs which suggest the pancreas might be the source of something which prevents diabetes, and when this something is lost, the dogs to develop diabetes.
Banting takes his idea to the great expert in diabetes, Dr. Macleod, at the University of Toronto, who believes the liver is the problem in diabetes, but Macleod agrees to provide Banting with a discarded laboratory in the attic of the University of Toronto and he provides a young PhD in physiology, Charles Best and some dogs, and between the two of them, they do the experiments which prove, to Banting's mind at least, there is something in there, which they call "insulin." It takes them all summer of 1921 to get enough data and when Dr. Macleod returns from his summer vacation in Scotland Banting is bursting to push ahead, but Macleod still has his doubts.
It takes more experiments and more argument, but eventually, Banting convinces Macleod and the rest is history, largely unread.
Ignaz Semmelweiss, in Hungary notices women who deliver in the hospital get "child bed fever' and some die, whereas women who deliver at home never do. He asks himself: Is there something we are doing in the hospital which might cause this disease? He notices doctors examining women after childbirth, putting their unwashed hands into the vaginas, often having come straight from the autopsy room. He postulates something on the hands of the doctors is transmitting the disease. The doctors on the hospital staff are outraged to be accused of spreading disease and they throw Semmelweiss off the staff and just about drive him to a nervous breakdown. Eventually, hand washing and rubber gloves and germ theory takes hold.
Each of these men have to fight entrenched, exalted authority and push beyond conventional wisdom toward the truth.
But who ever hears these stories in American schools?
If I had my way there'd be a course in high school, or college. There'd be an entire department in colleges, and there'd be a direct line to Tom Hanks or Spielberg--if they can make "Band of Brothers" or "Schindler's List," they can churn out miniseries about Banting and Best and Yersin and Semmelweiss and dozens of other giants who did their work, went to their graves and their stories are kept only by small cults of their descendants.
There is a department of History of Science at Harvard, but just try that website and see how accessible these men are.
What this country needs is a good dose of scientific literacy.
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