Outsider advantage

Ignaz Semmelweis pt. 2

“When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” - Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

Note: You’ll need to read the full Ignaz Semmelweis story for this to make sense, you can read it here.

Ignaz Semmelweis was an outsider.

He was part of a minority group in Hungary which was viewed as a second-class region by the ruling Austrians. His family had just worked its way into the middle-class. He spoke German, but it was a dialect that would have betrayed his identity. 

While the University of Vienna was a prestigious medical school, Semmelweis had no family or class reputation to protect and few expectations to live up to. He may have even had a chip on his shoulder, especially after he was twice rejected for assistant positions with prestigious doctors in some of the top fields of study at the time. He ended up as an assistant in the maternity ward, not the place you’d go to launch a rock star medical career in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. 

Being an outsider meant he didn’t have to fall in line with social pressures. If he failed to navigate office politics and his career advancement stalled, his family name wouldn’t have been tarnished. When others blamed childbed fever on the weather or the air quality, he was free to question. He let his curiosity carry him from one dead end to the next and took notes along the way. He had room to be the oddball who washed his hands at a time when everyone knew doctors were clean.

It would be a huge oversimplification to say being an outsider is the reason Semmelweis saved so many lives (how many others had similar backgrounds?), but it gave him an advantage. At its core, childbed fever wasn’t only a medical problem – it was a human problem. There’s a deeply human aversion to letting go — to change. He had less to let go of.