Training doctors caused higher maternal death rates than midwives in Vienna 1846

Evidence

Puerperal, or “childbed” fever, was rampant, killing 10 percent of patients on average. Meanwhile, in the second clinic, the presumably less knowledgeable midwives were losing only 3–4 percent of their patients. Even more surprising, the death rate for women who had so-called street births on the way to the hospital was much lower than for women who received the dubious help of the doctors-in-training. During Semmelweis’s first year, the first clinic’s reputation was so bad that his patients literally begged on their knees to be transferred to the second. — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 268

Categorization

• CANDY: A stark, tweetable paradox: the hospital’s credentialed doctors killed patients faster than the low-status midwives they outranked.
• XREF: connects to: Rational inference from others’ actions alone can push a whole group wrong — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 286