You wonder why people of long ago didn’t know? Well Jayant Patel, a trained surgeon, was convinced that surgeons had no need to wash their hands. he is now in the clink in Australia after practising here and in the USA.
As for Semmelweiss, I think you will find there were others. One of the indicators about cleanliness was the number of rich people dying during (or just after) childbirth as they were being treated by doctors fresh from the morgue whereas poor patients had midwives.
Yup. I think I read that a factor to Semmelweiss figuring it out was that midwives at least didn’t deal with sick people, just women giving birth (unless they happened to be sick too). Aside from antiseptic, what was Lister’s contribution?
I’ll see if I can find an article about it in the morning. It is in a book I have in the other part of the house which I have alarmed at the moment (it is late at night so I am not going to bother right now 
)
A HG isn’t going to infer a spherical earth just from the fact that high places are good vantage points - if you live in a wooded area, climbing a tree gives you a better view because you can see over some of the other trees. If you live in a hilly area, climbing a big hill gives you a better view because you can see over some of the smaller hills. If you’re sitting down in the middle of a seated crowd, standing up gives you a better view of more people - none of these things have anything to do with the curvature of the Earth - and I imagine a HG would just infer that ‘higher gives you a better view’ was the general phenomenon, instead.
Regarding inferring the Curvature of the Earth from the view atop a tall mountain :
As Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe both remarked, standing atop a tall mountain gives you a very peculiar impression of the shape of things – the ground at the base of the mountain is obviously very far below you (after all, you just spent all that time and energy getting up there). O the other hand, the horizon appears to be at the same level you are – it doesn’t appear to be below you, because you can look across at it and see the horizon apparently at your own level, dividing land (or sea) from sky.
The net result is that you get the impression that the world is a vast bowl, with yourself at the centers atop a promontory, with the ground far below, and it seems to rise everywhere on all sides from the base of the mountain toward the horizon. “Common sense” would dictate that, since the horizon was “down there” with you at the mountain’s base, you ought to be able to look down to where the horizon was. But instead the horizon appears to be at your own level, up there atop the mlountain. This can be particularly disconcerting if you’re on an island in the ocean, and it feels as if all that ocean is poised to rush “downhill” toward your mountain.
I suspect that this weird sense of “bowl-shapedness” would outweigh the intellectual knowledge that things were disappearing, especially since, even if the world were flat, you’d expect to see more of the world as you rose higher.
Actually, midwives weren’t allowed to dissect cavaders like the medical students were - all they got was a wooden model. The med students went right from Gross Anatomy 101 to the labor ward and everybody up and died of puerperal fever.
That’s probably why it took so long for us to figure that out. Like I said, it’s “much more difficult” to make the conclusion of a globe than it is to just figure out that climbing lets you see over stuff (and, to be clear, the mechanism of seeing farther is exactly the same in both cases. Climbing lets you “see over” the bulge in the earth, which is effectively a very large gently sloped hill).
I’m not saying they should have figured out that the earth is round, just that they could have, if they were logical and put some study into geometry. You don’t need tall ships to make the same kind of observations that will demonstrate that the world is round.
If you live near the sea, and there are offshore islands at the proper distance, you can’t see them while standing at the shore, but you can see them when you go inland and climb the hill. What’s more, you can see more of them the higher you climb. You’re obviously not seeing over any intervening obstacles.
If you live on the plains, where there are sparse trees, you can see the tops of distant trees before you can see the trunks. And of course if you climb a tree, you can see more distant trees. There’s nothing to see over here, either, just flat grassland.
Obviously, not everyone lives somewhere with geography convenient to make these observations. But plenty of people did.
This is a real good example, and one I always wondered about too. I could believe people had no clue about cancer and disease etc, but I can’t believe anyone ever thought smoking was GOOD for you. Smoking more than a few cigarettes in a day the strain on your lungs becomes obvious and easy to feel, I can’t believe anyone really thought it was good for you.
A lot of water in one go will kill you, so is water harmful in general?
Once you’ve rubbed off any soil anything else won’t make any noticeable change to taste. And bear in mind that for most of history clean water has been in relatively short supply.
So, should you wash your hands/food in dirty water (which would be pointless), or in the small amount of clean water you have for drinking (which from your POV appears pointless AND wasteful).
But obviously I’m not going to make excuses for doctors in the modern era who don’t follow hygienic practices though.
There’s no analogy for water & smoke. U need water to live; u don’t need any smoke. Too much of *anything *can kill u. I still don’t buy it that old-timers didn’t know smoking could kill u. From listening between the lines when my parents gave their excuses, it’s apparent they knew all along it was bad for u, even without the connection to cancer, emphysema, heart disease, etc. It was an indulgence they knew was bad for them, like candy, but with more serious consequences. Actually, the analogy to candy is apt if we apply it to diabetics. Now, no diabetic can claim they don’t know [sugared] candy is bad for them. But even back in the days of yore, no one needed to smoke.
Indeed–my response on reading those claims isn’t to try to figure out how they could be true, but to start with a simple question: cite? It seems perfectly plausible to me that our source of information is mistaken.
I don’t really believe the ‘how is babby formed?’ part of it. But I think many others can be explained by the low level of interest by a HG about the shape of the earth and other such things. As I said before, I’m sure they’ve seen the buffalo giving birth, but the questions about where and why the herd comes and goes, or why plants are abundant sometimes and not others would be better explained through supernatural forces. Although you are right to point out the faulty information part of it, Margaret Meade’s story was well accepted for many years. Anthropologists may tend to spend their time with the best story tellers instead of the most knowledgeable people they could talk to.
I don’t really believe the ‘how is babby formed?’ part of it. But I think many others can be explained by the low level of interest by a HG about the shape of the earth and other such things. As I said before, I’m sure they’ve seen the buffalo giving birth, but the questions about where and why the herd comes and goes, or why plants are abundant sometimes and not others would be better explained through supernatural forces. Although you are right to point out the faulty information part of it, Margaret Meade’s story was well accepted for many years. Anthropologists may tend to spend their time with the best story tellers instead of the most knowledgeable people they could talk to. And the subjects of study probably figure out the best stories get the most attention and form their own strategies based on that.
But people inhaling a little smoke are also able to still breathe normally.
Why would anyone equate smoking a cigarette to being trapped in a fire and suffocating? Both involve smoke…but its not at all the same thing.
Any smoker has pushed their usual intake and noticed ill effects and lung pain, the connection should be obvious.
But not that “Oh someday all this will kill me.”
Going back to the water analogy… I almost drown… Did that put me closer to death from drowning?
I’m saying knowing people die from suffocation in fires is not at all the same as people realizing that smoking damages your lungs long term.
Smoking was thought to have beneficial effects, such as calming and relaxing. My great grandmother was introduced to smoking by her doctor - concerned for her as she was stressed out nursing her ailing daughter and her husband, he took her into the kitchen, sat her down at the table and gave her her very first cigarette. On that doctor’s advice she took up smoking and smoked for the rest of her life. If it hadn’t been for him, she may have lived to a grand old age instead of dying at 93.
You were saying that because people can die of smoke inhalation it should be obvious that smoking long term is harmful. But the way that smoke inhalation kills (scorching the lungs, poisoning and suffocation) is nothing like the way that long term exposure kills (lung cancer).
There’s quite a leap of logic there with nothing else to go on.
You may as well argue that walking down stairs clearly causes lung cancer, because people who survive long falls often get a collapsed lung, and walking down stairs is lots of little falls.
Right. That’s so logical. At least I was comparing smoke to smoke. 
I don’t know about the smoke inhalation comparison but it seems obvious to me as well that anyone should be able to tell that smoking is bad for you long-term. You get smoker’s cough and premature facial aging from it as well as a raspy sounding voice. That should be obvious to anyone even if they didn’t notice the increase risk of heart and cancer problems.
The only thing I can think of is that so many people smoked back in the day plus they died earlier on average that they just didn’t notice the effects of smoking over the background noise of all the other terrible diseases that were lurking around. I am not sure about that though. Long-term smokers show some obvious signs by their 40’s or younger in general and I don’t think any of them look or sound good.