5 Ways That Zeus Raped His Way To Glory

History is filthy. And when I say filthy, I don't mean bootleg porno filthy. I'm talking full-scale filthy - somewhere between a live donkey show and a snuff film. In tribute to the sexual sins of our fathers and erstwhile gods, here are the five most innovative ways that Zeus ever used a fantastic disguise for the purposes of stranger rape.

5. The chick.

The victim: Callisto.

The ruse: The virginal Callisto was a follower of the goddess Artemis, so it was a simple enough matter for Zeus disguise himself as Artemis in order to lure Callisto into the woods and rape her.

The progeny: Arcas, king of Arcadia.

Oh, and... When Artemis found out that her supposedly virgin follower was pregnant, she turned Callisto into a bear and set her loose in the forest, where she gave birth (as a fucking BEAR) to Arcas. In the conventional wisdom of the Gods of the day, Zeus hid baby Arcas away and never bothered to tell him who his mother was. Again, typical of these motherfucking stories, Arcas goes hunting one day and actually shoots his bear-mother dead.

4. The long-lost husband.

The victim: Alcmene.

The ruse: At first, Zeus actually had the balls to approach the married Alcmene in person - and she actually had the balls to refuse him - but that's ok, cause Zeus had a Plan B. Alcmene's husband (and cousin) was away at war, and all Zeus had to do was to stage a passionate reunion, starring himself as Ron Jeremy's stand-in.

The progeny: Heracles (Hercules) - the greatest condom-full-of-walnuts in history.

Oh, and... We forgot to mention that Zeus just pulled out his time-turner and turned the night he was with Alcmene into three entire days. If Alcmene thought the Gods couldn't screw her any more than that, then check this out:

- Her husband swore against ever having sex with her again, out of respect to Zeus, who is clearly the Most Persuasive Rapist Of All Time.

- Zeus' wife Hera was so jealous that she sent a bitch goddess to intervene and stop Heracles from being born. Alcmene was in labour for seven entire days before finally tricking the Gods into leaving her the fuck alone.

Again, it just sucks to be a woman in Ancient Greece.

3. The bull (or was it an eagle)?

The victim: Europa

The ruse: There are two equally screwed up version of this story. According to Robert Graves, Zeus became enamoured of Europa, "became an eagle and ravished (her) in a willow-thicket". Or, if you prefer Ovid's version, Zeus rocked up as a white bull, which she trusted enough to "mount its back" - and get carried off and raped. Perhaps the most frightening inherent aspect of these accounts is how any historical sources could have possibly confused an eagle with a fucking bull.

The progeny: Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon, who all went on to become Kings.

Oh, and... Zeus named Europe after Europa in the world's most pathetic attempt at making up for getting raped by a bull.

2. The Swan.

The victim: Leda

The ruse: An oldie but a goodie - why not just try showing up and having sex with a defenceless woman at a waterhole - dressed as a giant swan? Good idea? Great idea.

The progeny: Helen - who later became Helen of Troy. Also the twins Castor and Polydeuces, who later became the sign Gemini.

Oh, and... Did we mention that the children hatched out of eggs?

1. The golden shower.

The victim: Danae.

The ruse: Danae's father Ascrisius lacked an heir, and loved consulting random hacks dressed up as Oracles. Naturally, one of them handed him the type of beautifully self-fulfilling prophecy that we've come to expect from Ancient Greece- namely, that his daughter would give birth to a son who would grow up to slaughter him. The most obvious available solution was to shut the virgin Danae in a tall tower only accessible from a trapdoor in the ceiling.

Zeus, being the classy fella that he is, decided he was tired of appearing as a giant bird and went to Plan B - which happened to be falling as a "shower of golden rain". Which, we assume, is just a euphemism for "pissed all over her".

The progeny: Perseus, who tamed Pegasus, defeated the Gorgon, saved a princess and managed to look hot in a tunic in modern film adaptations.

Oh, and... Proving that effective parenting comes naturally, Ascrisius cast Danae and the newborn Perseus into the sea in a sealed casket. Unfortunately for Ascrisius, they washed up onto another island, where Perseus was raised in blissful ignorance of his connection to his homeland. Sure enough, he returned as an adult to kill his asshole grandfather - proving yet again that consulting an Oracle is a fucking stupid thing to do.

In case you ever wondered what humans taste like...

Admit it, you've probably wondered about this ever since Hannibal Lecter sneered about eating an auditor's liver "with fava beans and a nice Chianti". But, let's face it, there are a paucity of people to ask, and those in the know tend to be close-lipped on the subject. In the modern age of broken taboos, the last one left intact might be the frank admission that you chowed down on a person.

So what do we taste like? Game? Chicken? If we use Lecter's choice of wine as a barometer, we might taste like beef, which matches well with a hearty Italian red. Or perhaps, if we listen to Fat Bastard from The Spy Who Shagged Me, we taste like pork (the other other white meat). Actually, the pork hypothesis is a strong one - Christopher Hitchens elaborates on the similarities between humans and pigs in God Is Not Great, in an attempt to explain why so many religions eschew pork products. Basically, he surmises, we aren't supposed to eat pork because pigs are much, much too like people.

It makes some sense that we would avoid eating an animal so much like ourselves - pigs are balder than most stock, and a lot more intelligent. Their organs are so much like ours that pig insulin was given to diabetic patients until a synthetic type was developed. Pigs are said to cry tears of grief, and to scream in a very human manner when trussed up for slaughter. The slang term for roasted human amongst Papua New Guinean tribes that practice cannibalism is "long pig", and Hitchens notes that firefighters tend to dislike pork, and especially pork crackling. Apparently, once you've smelt a burned human carcass... well, I'm sure I don't need to finish that sentence.

So we taste like pork, right?

Wrong, according to a New Yorker called William Seabrook, who decided to break the last taboo and try human flesh whilst travelling in West Africa in the 1930s. Finding that it was not uncommon for the locals to munch on roasted people from time to time, Seabrook approached the village chief and asked if humans really did, as he had heard, taste like pork. The chief was puzzled by this question, stating than that he had eaten pork many times and that human flesh was nothing like it, nothing at all. (We can suspect that he must have followed this up with "you dumb-ass whitey", or similar). Seabrook bided his time and waited for the opportunity to find out for himself.

Soon afterwards, he found that opportunity, in the form of a freshly killed 30 year old man whom the locals assured Seabrook was "not murdered". Seabrook never bothered to ascertain the man's cause of death, but instead set to work in cooking a small rib roast and a "sizeable rump steak". "I proposed", he wrote, "to make a meal of it as one would any other meat, with rice and a bottle of wine". And make a meal of it he did, as well as taking meticulous and detailed notes on the texture, colour, smell and taste of the raw and cooked portions.

If you're still with us, then here is the crux of what he had to say:

"I took a big swallow of wine, a helping of rice, and thoughtfully ate half the steak. And as I ate, I knew with increasing conviction and certainty exactly what it was like. It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef...

"The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in colour, texture, smell, as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable... as to the 'long pig' legend... it was totally, completely false".

Seabrook, the man who referred to himself "thoughtfully" chewing on a dead man's cooked buttock, wrote that he felt "a sense of pride in having carried something through to its finish", and congratulated himself upon "a long-standing personal curiosity satisfied at last". At the time of writing his memoirs, he noted that "Neither then, or at any time since have I had any serious personal qualms, either of digestion or conscience". That said, he became known as The White Cannibal of New York, and eventually committed suicide in 1945 amid speculation that he was going insane. (It took people that long to notice something was wrong here?)

But one man's pork is another man's veal... and another man's tuna, if we listen to Issei Sagawa, the "Cannibal of the Bois de Boulogne", who famously murdered and ate his unrequited love in 1981 in Paris. Sagawa related that her flesh was "soft" and "odorless", "like tuna". However I think we can assume that any dickhead who considers tuna to be "odorless" (not to mention, any dickhead who thinks he can emulate the health and beauty of a woman by ingesting her) can be safely written off as complete whack-job with too much time on his hands.

So to return to Lecter - take a bow! According to Seabrook, our most credible source on the subject, his wine choice (a nice Chianti) is a stylish match with the regional Italian speciality of tender veal.
Or person.

Horton vs. Roe vs. Wade

Anyone who's ever spent time with a kid should worship Dr Seuss. I do. No other children's author has every quite matched Seuss for style; the guy has a back catalogue of over 60 books, and the 222 million copies sold are jam-packed with some of the most original and bizarre characters and stories every created, which not only entertain children, but teach them to read, act as a diction trainer and impart gentle moral lessons - and all without ever sounding preachy or boring. Seuss (actually born Theodor Seuss Geisel) gave up the twin worlds of Preachy and Boring when he decided to throw in the towel as a political cartoonist, and start writing and drawing for an audience who might actually, well... learn something.

Some of the lessons sink in early, such as; try new things, you might like them (Green Eggs and Ham); and sometimes the best thing to be is yourself (I Wish That I Had Duck Feet).

Others come quietly in their wake. Protect the trees (The Lorax); and don't judge people who look different from you (The Sneetches). Seuss didn't stop at environmentalism and race-relations. He railed against materialism in How The Grinch Stole Christmas, against fascism in Yertle the Turtle*, and provided some fairly unclear advice to young boys in Oh! The Places You'll Go! with regards to staying focused despite getting "mixed up with many strange birds".

And then, there's Horton Hears A Who! ** Purportedly, it's about internationalism, and the importance of reaching out to other cultures (OK fine, it's about a giant sky-elephant and a talking kangaroo). And then, you have your factions who've managed to pull Dr Seuss into the abortion debate.

There are so many things wrong with that sentence. For one, the debate's basically been over for a couple decades***. And, oh yeah, for two: Some jerk actually got Dr Seuss involved in this shite. On what basis, you may ask? Two little lines;

... although you can't see them or hear them at all,

A person's a person, no matter how small.

Let's get this straight; when Horton the Elephant uttered those words, he was referring to tiny little people living on a speck on a flower. Seuss was generally pretty clear about the messages in his works. In comparison to the Lorax, who came straight out and said; I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues, there's a notable absence of fetal advocacy here. Even Seuss, the great envelope-pusher, can't be accused of sufficent bad taste as to use children's books as a medium for brainwashing kids about the evils of abortion.

Seuss actually disapproved thorougly of his work being co-opted in this manner, and his widow has in recent years threatened to sue several anti-choice protest groups for having the audacity to reprint the phrases on their stationery****. Undeterred by this very clear message, the protesters used the L.A. premiere of the film version of Horton as a picketing ground.

Without dwelling upon the seeming lack of logic in picketing what they believe to be a pro-life film, or the total lack of style involved in raising abortion at the premiere of a children's movie, there's a beautiful irony here. If you had have asked me, I'd have said that Horton is all about waking up to the world around you - something these guys seem not to have done for a long, long time.

* As Lisa Simpson put it, "possibly the finest book ever written on the subject of turtle-stacking". For more on turtle-stacking, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

** Seriously, what is with this guy and ending his book titles with an exclamation point? Paging Elaine Benes!

*** Yes, it fucking well is. Anti-choice protesters are just kidding themselves.

**** Oddly enough, she didn't try to sue the Australian organisation Doctors for Forest for their use of The Lorax in promoting environmental awareness. Maybe that's because the book is... um... actually about saving trees?

Are You Smarter Than A Screenwriter?

I'm determined not to write about Christmas.

So, instead, I'm providing a compilation of my favourite cinematic fuck-ups, that is, in terms of small matters such as historical accuracy or scientific fact. Of course, we have to allow a little artistic license in films - for example, The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars would never have gotten off the ground if we insisted on a degree of factuality that would rule out aliens, elves, and giant fucking fire monsters. However, some of the shit flushed our way, even in decent films by respectable directors, is just too blatant to go without stating.

Now for the nasty nine...

9. Requiem For A Dream

Crime: Not fact-checking the effect of heroin upon human pupils.

It breaks my heart to have to include this gem of a film, but its one glaring flaw is the repeated motif of the characters' pupils expanding after they inject heroin. In fact, human pupils do the exact opposite in response to opiates; contracting to pin-pricks. Which is why junkies often refer to being "pinned". This is Hollywood, people! You can't scrape up a single ex-junkie to talk to?

8. Troy

Crimes: Many, including Achilles' alleged heterosexuality.

Never mind the fact that the producers intentionally ignored and misrepresented the "Achilles heel" component, there was a bigger problem concering Achilles and his cousin, Patroclus. Historical sources including The Iliad (and later, Plato), paint a vastly different picture of the"beloved friends" than does the film. Let's just say it. Sodomy. There. We said it.

7. The Last Samurai

Crime: The entire premise. And the entire story. And Tom Cruise being alive at the end.

Let's get this straight. Samurai were proud warriors who clung fiercely to notions of caste, ethnicity, and a horribly violent code called Bushido. Barbarians (yes, that was actually the term for Whitey) being allowed to train in their secret and ancient practices? To fuck and marry one of their chaste women? To go to battle, lose the battle, and return home to open arms? Nope. In fact, Samurai don't believe in returning home after losing a battle. At all. It's a pretty Spartan arrangement, what with the whole "Come back with your sword or on it" mindset. If you lose, you either get nailed by the enemy, or commit ritual Seppaku, which is basically disembowelling yourself after a polite tea ceremony.

6. Braveheart

Crime: Mel "Sugar Tits" Gibson unwittingly becomes a paedophile as well as a sexist anti-semite.

I understand that this film probably had to include a tacky, tacked-on romance to keep the chicks happy between the gruesome scenes of slaughter, but couldn't they have just made a character up? William Wallace (Mel Gibson) is portrayed as having an illicit affair with Princess Isabelle of France (Sophie Marceau). In fact, when William Wallace was hung, drawn and quartered in 1305, little Princess Izzy was only 10 years old. At the time of the alleged affair, she would have been three.

5. The People vs Larry Flynt

Crime: The wrong guy gets shot.

Somewhere out there, a man called Gene Reeves Jnr is very pissed off. That's because, in actuality, it was Gene Reeves Jnr, and not Alan Isaacman, who was shot and badly wounded alongside Flynt outside a Cincinatti courthouse. Reeves, and a bunch of other less important lawyers, were neatly superimposed into the one character of Isaacman, to make the story easier to follow. "Um... won't that guy be pissed that he got edited out of history?" ... Yeah. I reckon.

4. Twister

Crime: The F5 Twister fails to break a horse harness, or the characters' necks.

Despite the fact that it neatly blew several farm houses and silos to smithereens, tossed around some tanker trucks, and just about levelled the entire countryside, the final, giant tornado is finally outfoxed by Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt gripping on to some old bits of leather strap attached to a water pipe in an old barn. Auntie Em, that twister just ain't right.

3. Apolcalypto

Crime: The Conquistadores are about 300 years early.

Mel "Are-You-A-Jew?" Gibson contends that the Spaniards who arrive on the beaches at the end of the film, to the disbelief of the Mayan locals, were meant to be the batch that arrived in 1502. Awesome. Except that the last known Mayan cities were abandoned by at least 300 years earlier.

2. Outbreak

Crime: The miracle antigen.

Cuba Gooding Jnr + 1 small rhesus monkey + 5 minutes = enough viral antigen to save a town of several thousand people from a deadly Ebola-type virus. Efficient stuff!

1. Every sci-fi film except "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Crime: Sound in space

Those great explosions with the cochlear-shredding impact you get in the cinemas require air to travel through if they're going to be heard. Space is essentially a giant vacuum, and by all accounts completely silent. In space, nobody can hear you fuck up the facts.

Apologies to all who were expecting this list to include Tommy Lee Jones holding up a river of lava with a few concrete roadblocks and a garden hose, but I've got it on good authority that the plot of Volcano was technically plausible. In that one respect. Technically.

Purgatorio

Throughout the drawn-out process of moving house, it seems that almost everyone I know has sympathetically opined that "it's the second most stressful thing you'll go through in your life", with the first being divorce. I'm not sure where everyone has apparently sourced this piece of information, but it's become a modern axiom - at least in well-fed Western countries where the fear of war, starvation, extreme poverty or genocide has receded into a comfortable background. In any event, I disagree. Moving house was far more stressful than my divorce.

"It's like the fifth circle of Hell", Clever Colleague suggested helpfully.

"What gets punished in the fifth circle?" I asked, warily.

CC furrowed her brows. "Actually, I don't know. It just seemed like a good, mid-level sort of Hell. Would you prefer the seventh circle?"

Unknowingly, CC was right on the money. The fifth circle of Dante's Inferno is where the wrathful and slothful are sent for punishment. (I'm a prime candidate in both departments, alternating my spare afternoon hours between road rage and siestas.) Of course, that's not the only place that us lazy bums can end up. The other is Purgatorio.

Dante envisioned purgatory as an island of concentric terraces rising upwards out of the Southern Oceans. Each sin gets its own terrace, where the wicked endure various degrees of tortuous suffering in the name of spiritual growth. The punishments, ironically, fit the crimes, and therefore we find the Proud struggling to hold their shoulders up under the weight of huge boulders, the Gluttonous abstaining from food and drink... and the slothful, running in perpetuity to atone for their laziness on Earth.

I was struck by the comparison. Rather than being Hell, moving house is basically a form of Purgatory on Earth, where we are forced to confront our months or years of slothful housekeeping and haphazard storage. Thus, for over a month, Clever Partner and I were constantly running to atone for our sins. We marvelled with the hindsight of a soul in Purgatory - didn't we know that the oven should have been cleaned every six months? Could we not have forseen the problems inherent in simply shoving unwanted items out of the way to the top of bookshelves or underneath tables? Should we not have realised that our failure to properly clean out five years' worth of accumulated junk from various expat flatmates would result in a mountain of detritus that would take the council three collections to dispose of?

Well, apparently not. We didn't, and, considering the degree to which comparisons between moving house and Hell are readily accepted, nobody else does, either. And now that we have worked out way through Purgatory to the Paradise of the New House, let us bow our heads and pray:

"May we always remember to scrub the grout,
Have the wisdom to unblock the downspout.
Free us from rising damp and insect hordes,
From leaking taps and rotten old floorboards.
May we never seek to store things overhead
Atop shelves and cupboards, or below our bed.
Deliver us from black-spot mould
And, please, before this house is sold
Shall we ever strive to clean, and then
Roll up our sleeves and clean again."

Amen.

Unintelligent Design

Last week, I found myself in the most amusing of discussions with a proponent of the so-called Theory of Intelligent Design. I've enjoyed arguing against this watered-down little brother of Biblical Creationism since I first came across it, and certainly jumped at the chance to do so with Grinning Devotee.


The conversation followed the normal gyrations - first, he put it to me that evolution was "just a theory", which didn't comprehensively account for the complexity of the human body - a creation so marvellous that it must warrant a designer. Ignoring the logical follow-up question ("who designed the designer?"), I argued that there was no real evidence against the theory of evolution, other than the spurious claim that anything complex must have been consciously created or designed rather than having painstakingly evolved via natural selection. Finally, he turned the accusation around. "What evidence is there, looking at the extraordinary complexity of the human body, that it wasn't designed by a higher intelligence?", he challenged.

And this is where it got fun. The human body is a veritable laundry list of unintelligent features, just a few of which are provided below for your consideration.

Appendixes: First on the list would have to be an organ which, despite serving no discernible function, can explode, flood our bodies with poison, and kill us in a matter of days. Intelligent Design disciples have consistently had difficulty providing any explanation for the inclusion of this vestigial organ in an intelligently-designed human body.

Hemorrhoids: Yes, hemorrhoids. Apart from being painful, the humble hemorrhoid is renowned for occurring exclusively in humans. As the only truly bipedal mammals, humans have evolved in one distinctly unintelligent way. Think about it - can you name another mammal whose anus is directly below its centre of gravity?

Semen Allergy: Referred to in medical circles as Human Seminal Plasma Hypersensitivity, this condition causes around 5% of women to have an allergic reaction to proteins in their partner's semen. The reaction can involve anything from redness and itching, to hives, blisters, and even anaphylactic shock. It's hard to think of a less intelligent factor to include in human reproduction.

Maternal Mortality: On the note of women's health, the WHO estimates that the lifetime risk of death caused by pregnancy and childbirth is a whopping 1 in 16 for women who don't have access to modern medical techniques such as Caesarean sections and blood transfusions. This rate is a great deal higher in humans than in other mammals. It's easy to see why. Our brains and heads have evolved rapidly to become much larger than the heads of any other ape, whilst our pelvises are disproportionately small.

Wisdom Teeth: This item should come as no surprise to anyone who's visited their dentist for the painfully expensive, and just plain painful experience of having these yanked out of your head. These teeth are thought to be vestigial remnants of a larger human jaw, containing more teeth for crushing and chewing plant matter, but now they essentially serve the function of creating wealth in the dental industry, and providing mortifying pain and infection to a large proportion of human adults. Archaeologists examining mass graves from the middle ages have surmised that the majority of (non-accidental) adolescent deaths from the period were probably caused by major impaction of the third molars. In terms of the debate at hand, it seems ironic that they're called wisdom teeth.

The Human Spine: In the course of their lives, up to 90% of adults will experience back pain. For many, the pain will be severe, and debilitating enough to cause significant problems with mobility, work, leisure and sleep. As far back as 1951, the late-great anthropologist and anatomist W.M. Krogman argued that the high incidence of vertebral problems in humans, which is not observed in other animals, can be attributed to the failure of the human spine to adequately adapt to walking upright. As he noted in Scientific American "the result is some ingenious adaptations, not all of them successful".

and finally...

Cancer: It's hard to argue that there's anything intelligent about cells which can be genetically programmed to turn into fatal tumours.

Grinning Devotee was amused, but unconvinced by the evidence of poor planning entailed in the human body. He said;

"You can't get pissed at God for everything that can go wrong with a good design."

"On the plus side", I said, "if you believe in evolution, then you don't need to get pissed with God at all."

"Ah," said Grinning Devotee. "Now you're just trying to be clever."

How intelligent is Intelligent Design?

Being Right When Nobody Will Listen

Modern history is strewn with the carcasses of women who died for their cause.

This is not their story.

This is the story of a man whose life was also laid down to advance the lot of women. His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, and his name should be better known than it is, because women out there, everywhere, owe him big time.

Incidentally, "strewn with carcasses" is a good way to start this story, because Semmelweis was a doctor in a time when medicine wasn't too advanced. In the 1830s, a time before antisepsis, anaesthetics, germ-theory, or any of today's medical trimmings and trappings, Ignaz made his way from his native Hungary to study medicine in Vienna. By 1846, he was the head of Vienna's General Obstetric Hospital, where, incidentally, maternal deaths averaged at about 10% of admissions. They all seemed to display the same symptoms; a high fever, abdominal swelling, and skin pustules. Semmelweis wrote that he was perplexed by the death rate - even women delivering in the streets were dying less often than women in the clinic. But by 1847, he had discovered something brilliant - and unprecedented.

A colleague of old Ignaz had cut his hand whilst conducting an autopsy, and within a few days died with the same presenting symptoms as the mothers in the clinic. So Ignaz Semmelweis concluded that "cadaverous particles" carried on the hands might actually be causing the deaths. He instituted a policy which was to see him hounded out of the medical profession: compulsory hand-washing in a chlorine solution.

Within a few months of his policy's implementation, two things had occurred in a noticeable fashion. Firstly, women were dying at radically lower rates - the death rate had dropped from 10% to less than 2%. Secondly, Ignaz's popularity and credibility had plummeted. Many doctors considered the idea that they carried disease-causing particles on their hands to be both nonsensical and the highest form of insult. Semmelweis was dismissed from his post at the hospital in 1848 on the spurious accusation of political activism, and openly ridiculed by the medical profession to the point where he returned to Budapest.

As his credibility wore through, so did his sanity. Semmelweis began writing angry letters to anyone who would read them, and eventually published in 1961 a book of "Open Letters" lambasting the entire medical profession as well as many famous individuals. In the last decades of his life, he became a man obsessed. All conversations were turned to childbed fever. He began stopping unknown couples in the street and tearfully begging them to ensure, should they ever have children, that the doctor washed his hands. He began drinking heavily and visiting prostitutes. Some believed that his brain may have been succumbing to syphilis.

Eventually, in 1865, he was sold out. A colleague persuaded his wife to allow Semmelweis to be committed to a mental institution, where he was subjected to beatings, placed in a straitjacket, and administered laxatives and enemas in the customary style of the day. A slight wound sustained in a beating from the guards turned gangrenous, and in an ironic twist which would be glorious were it not so terrible, Semmelweis died from precisely the disease he had spent his lifetime attempting to beat; septicaemia.

Had he only lived a little longer, Semmelweis would have seem himself vindicated by history. With the work of Pasteur and Lister, germ-theory became accepted and the sensible policy of handwashing made compulsory practice. Semmelweis' name now graces a university, a museum, and several medical facilities, whilst his visage has graced European coins and postage stamps. In Hungary he is known as "the saviour of mothers". Oddly enough, the psychological catchphrase "the Semmelweis Reflex" is sometimes used to denote the kind of knee-jerk reaction people take to things that fall outside their accepted frame of reference.

I guess the take home lesson here is that it's hard to be right when nobody will listen. Ignaz Semmelweis was by no means the first person to find that out (just ask Socrates), but his story is particularly ironic and painful because he wasn't actually asking that much. The man lost his life and his sanity because people didn't want to wash their hands.

So, like I said, we owe him big time.