We’re only two years away from Louis Pasteur’s discovery of the germ theory of disease. If the medical community had been a little more receptive and a little less anti-Semitic toward Ignaz Semmelweis a decade earlier, we would already have the germ theory. But Pasteur was ridiculed and Semmelweis was presumably beaten to death in a mental hospital instead.
The Lysenkoists weren’t invented by Stalin in the 1930s. As Galileo knew, they’ve always been with us.
The “four-humors” theory hung on and on and on, even as pragmatic medical practice, and surgery with hands washed was saving lives.
It’s just hard to teach people anything. You can’t read the Bible without coming to this conclusion.