Misconceptions Created by Tulodziecki’s Revisionist Account of Semmelweis’s Theory and Reasoning in the Philosophy of Science Literature

Abstract

Semmelweis’s work on the nature and cause of childbed fever has been used as a ‘paradigm case’ by philosophers of science “to illustrate aspects of the confirmation of theory by data” for more than fifty years (Scholl & Räz 2016). However, in 2013, Dana Tulodziecki challenged this paradigmatic view, and argued, based on a reconstruction of Semmelweis’s work that differed from “the standard story as it is found in the extant philosophical literature on Semmelweis”, that Semmelweis was “not the excellent reasoner he has been supposed to be.” Philosophers of science have accepted Tulodziecki’s reconstruction of Semmelweis work at face value as valid, and have already used it to question the philosophical theses Semmelweis work has been used to illustrate. The purpose of this article is to cut short this revisionist trend by demonstrating that, based on the Semmelweis’s own account of his theory and reasoning, and on other contemporaneous publications, Tuloziecki’s account of Semmelweis’s work is in every material respect incorrect and historically untenable.