>>91378680Spoiler alert: the scientific community is made of people. Have you idea of what you need to do an incontrovertible research? A lot. And medicine is even more complicate than things like physics.
Most of the times theories change not because of a single work, but because of a lot of them that taken singularly can be easily dismissed on technical reasons (not enought data, not statistically significat, no control group, the work is user dependant) but taken as a group can't.
And let's admit it, the guy didn't have incontrovertible proof. He just had data about a correlation between the use of chlorine for washing hands and the drop of childbed fevers. Correlation do not imply causation. There could have been hundreds of reasons. He himself believed that chlorine did the trick because it destroyed smell and bad vapours. Even in today scientific community an idea like that would have not been taken into consideration until much more and affidable data would have eventually surfaced, even more if the one proposing it was an asshole. Which is exactly what happened with Pasteur, which had much more proof and more affidable data than a very weak correlation.
It's easy for us to recognize his theory as right in hindsight. But it's like if today someone started saying that cheese cause deadly nightmares using as data pic related. Maybe un hundred years from now the fact would be commonly accepted and the guy heralded as a visionary rejected by his time. Right now it seems crazy.
