To Seeing Yourself Objectively

In the mid 19th century, hospitals were scary places. Back then there was no concept of the Germ Theory of Disease. Which means pregnant mothers often passed away.

Take for example the Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic. Here mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth as often as 10%. But it wasn't all bad news: at the Second Obstetrical Clinic, it was only 4%--and everyone knew this--some would beg on their knees and beg to be switched over to the Second Clinic, rather than the First. Some even decided they'd rather give birth on the streets.

This is where the hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis comes in; an assistant at the First Clinic, he couldn't bear this. So he desperately searched for some kind of explanation for the difference. He tested out many things, but all proved to be unsuccessful. Then, in 1847, Semmelweis's friend was performing an autopsy when a student accidentally poked him him with a scalpel. It was a minor injury, but his friend got terribly sick and ultimately passed away. This got Semmelweis wondering: with all these symptoms similar to what the mothers had, was some "deathly material" on the corpses responsible for the deaths?

To find out, he insisted the doctors start washing their hand with chlorinated lime (which he found best removed the stink of death) before handling the pregnant women. The results were remarkable. The mortality rate fell from 18.3% to 2.2% in one month! It was even less for the following months and--for the first time ever--it flat lined to zero by the end of the year.

Now you'd think, Rachel, that the other doctors would be thrilled by this discovery. Unfortunately this wasn't the case: Semmelweis was ridiculed and attacked. He was fired from the hospital and forced out of Vienna. "In published medical works my teachings are either ignored or attacked," he wrote. "The medical faculty at Würzburg awarded a prize to a monograph written in 1859 in which my teachings were rejected."

Semmelweis turned to alcohol as he watched thousands of pregnant wives continuing to die every year even in his native Vienna. He was later committed to a mental institution, and there, he was beaten by the guards, placed in a straightjacket, and locked in a dark cell. Semmelweis died at the age of 47 shortly after. From an infected wound.

Why did the doctors so stubbornly reject Semmelweis? Well, imagine being told you were responsible for the deaths of thousands of your patients. That you were so bad at your job that you were actually worse than just giving birth on in the street.

Something I've been thinking about in my "Stigma and Prejudice" class Rachel, is that it doesn't help much when our friends point out what we did wrong. If we are so scared of hearing from ourselves that we made a mistake, just imagine how much we hate hearing it from someone else. We all know this. Indeed, we go out of our way to avoid it--and when we do confront it, we try to downplay it or explain it away--it's called Cognitive Dissonance. We hate hearing bad news about ourselves so much that we'd rather change our behavior than just admit we screwed up.

The answer to "does this make me look fat?" is never a "yes." Or, we may joke about our friends' idiosyncrasies when they're not there, but rarely to their face. There's so much effort that goes in making sure employees are insulated from their superior's most negative assessments. Society teaches us to make six compliments for every criticism and sandwich negative feedback with positive ones. Oh yes, the most important thing is to keep up one's self-esteem.

From Semmelweis's story, we know this is a dangerous habit. It's not great to hear you're killing people--but it's way worse to keep on killing people! It may not be fun to be told you're lazy, but it's better to hear it now than to find out when you're fired. God, I didn't mean for this to be so verbose, but maybe what I'm trying to say is this: if you want to work on getting better, you need to start knowing where you are.

Semmelweis would eventually be vindicated, proving the germ theory of disease. Today, he's an international hero: universities and hospitals are named after him, his house is now a museum, and he's even the face of Austria's €50 gold coin. Meanwhile, the doctors who opposed him are now seen as close-minded killers.

You can't beat reality. Firing Semmelweis, driving him out of the country, writing long books disproving all his claims--none of it can make you change the facts. I'm sure, the doctors thought they were winning the argument at the time.

In moments of great emotional stress, we revert to our worst habits: we dig in and fight harder. The real trick is not to get better at fighting — it’s to get better at stopping ourselves: at taking a deep breath, calming down, and letting our better natures take over from our worst instincts.

Even if seeing ourselves objectively is the best option, all our natural instincts all point the other direction. Not only do we try hard to avoid bad news about ourselves, we tend to exaggerate the good news. Imagine you and Jane are both up for a promotion. You want it bad, so you stay late, you work weekends. Sure, some things still slip through the cracks — but even those mistakes have really good reasons! Jane never does anything like that.

But if she did — would you even know? We see the world from our own perspective. When we have to cancel hanging out with friends to do extra work, we always see that — and feel the sacrifice. But when Jane does it, we see and feel nothing. You only get to see your own perspective. And even our mistakes make sense from our perspective — we see all of the context, everything that led up to it. It all makes sense because we saw it happen. When we screw up, it’s for a reason. When other people screw up, it’s because they’re screwups.

We have to learn to take the outside view. We’re always locked in our own heads, where everything we do makes sense. I have to work at seeing what I look like from the outside for a bit, assuming I don’t know any of those details.


#tochip