The Semmelweis reflex

Imagine that you are a physician on a hospital staff and another doctor at the hospital discovers a procedure that dramatically reduces the death rate of its patients.  Wouldn’t you and the other doctors at the hospital eagerly adopt the procedure and practice it  yourselves?  The answer is so obvious to most people that it seems stupid to even ask such a question.  But a doctor name Ignaz Semmelweis did discover such a process and the other doctors rejected it.  Here is Wikipedia’s description of what happened.

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