Can the history of medicine help social sciences out of their dark ages?

as to:

In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis, then a lowly assistant physician in the world’s largest maternity clinic, made a discovery that would save the lives of countless women. When one of his colleagues received a puncture wound during an autopsy on a woman with childbed fever — a fever caused by postpartum infection — and died of an illness that presented the same symptoms, he had an aha moment. Semmelweis realized that medical students who came directly to the maternity ward after performing autopsies were probably transferring “cadaveric matter” to pregnant women. This was, after all, before antisepsis and the germ theory of disease, before routine handwashing and the sterilization of medical instruments. As a test, he ordered the students to wash their hands in chlorinated water before performing their deliveries. The mortality rate plummeted.

That short recap misses the hostility that Semmelweis faced from the supposed 'scientific community' at the time:

You would think that the doctors would praise Semmelweis for his discovery, but instead, they were outraged. Many were completely offended that someone would suggest that they were the cause of these deaths. Some were incensed that someone would have the audacity to claim that their hands were dirty at all—after all, they were gentlemen. Their hands couldn’t be dirty. Because of this, Semmelweis was laughed at, despite his demonstrable success in saving thousands of women’s lives. After being denied the ability to influence the greater medical establishment in Vienna for political and cultural reasons in 1848, he left Vienna. He ended up becoming the head obstetrician in Pest (modern-day Hungary). There he replicated his results and nearly eliminated Puerperal Fever entirely. By now, he was having physicians not only wash their hands, but sterilize their instruments as well. This lead to a further drop in the death rate. He ended up in a mental institution, though, for what we would now know to be a combination of severe depression and possibly early-onset Alzheimer’s syndrome. Two weeks later, he was beaten to death by guards. A man who should have been a medical hero met a sad, tragic end. https://www.littleimages.org/blog/semmelweis/ ,,, As time went by, Semmelweis became angrier, more dejected, and more stressed. In 1865, he was detained in a mental hospital against his will. When he tried to leave, he was severely beaten by the guards, bound in a straitjacket, and imprisoned in a darkened cell. Two weeks later, at the age of 47, he died from a septic wound, probably caused by the beating.12 https://creation.com/semmelweis

Sounds very similar to the hostile reaction of present day Darwinists to any evidence that challenges their theory Of related note,

Creation and the Germ Theory How a Biblical Worldview Encouraged the Concept that Germs Make Us Sick by Dr. Alan L. Gillen and Douglas Oliver on July 29, 2009 Excerpt: In this short paper, we provide historical background on the emergence of the germ theory of disease in the 1800s. Christians, Jews, and non-religious scientists have contributed to the germ theory over the past 150 years. The basic history of the germ theory is given in many texts, most often giving credit to the experimental work of Pasteur, Lister, and Koch. However, the role of worldview, and the fact that many of these scientists were Christian and creation biologists, is often left out (Table 1).1 This article seeks to illustrate how creation and biblical thinking led to the germ theory in a logical chain of development. https://answersingenesis.org/biology/microbiology/creation-and-the-germ-theory/ "Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.,,, In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word – "Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology." Philip S. Skell - (the late) Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.discovery.org/a/2816

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