As a society, it seems difficult for humans to accept new discoveries, even if the truth is already obvious. Novelty and unknown things can be scary, so people are reluctant to accept these new things and try to suppress those who find them.

Pagans, unruly people, madmen - these are nicknames that people have often called for many scientists and open thinkers in history.

As a society, it seems difficult for humans to accept new discoveries, even if the truth is already obvious. Novelty and unknown things can be scary, so people are reluctant to accept these new things and try to suppress those who find them.

Medical miracles, the truth of the universe, and the chemicals that are slowly killing us - these discoveries were ridiculed by many people at the time and were not recognized until many years later.

So when scientists and doctors overcome criticism, sometimes physical threats, show how dedicated they are to their jobs. Today we can read their stories and appreciate the sacrifices they have made for the greater human good.

John Snow tried to warn everyone that contaminated water supply was the reason for cholera

Before John Snow became the most popular character in " Game of Thrones ", the name was famous for discovering the way cholera spread in the UK in the mid-19th century.

Snow has long believed that this infectious disease is caused by water pollution, but the accepted explanation at the time was that inhaling harmful gases was the real cause. (People seem to think that "bad air" is the cause of many things during this period.)

His idea was quickly dismissed, but Snow continued to search for evidence. When an cholera outbreak in his community, killing 500 people, he began tracking the pollution radius and found irrefutable evidence that each case originated from drinking water in a particular town water pump. What is more telling is that there are hundreds of prisoners nearby, and no case of cholera has been infected. The air they breathe is basically the same as the infected person, but the prison has its own well.

Despite this overwhelming evidence, officials still disapprove of Snow's theory—until an article showed that a leaky sewage pool several feet away from the pump could be the culprit of the disease outbreak.

Joseph Lister suggests that surgical instruments should be disinfected when performing surgery

In the early 19th century, surgical surgery had just emerged as a way to save lives. With the invention of anesthesia, surgeons can try more complex procedures than before.

However, those surgeries that take longer, also mean greater risks. This is because medical professionals don't understand bacteria. They think the cause of the infection is "bad air" - also known as miasma theory, so they just ventilate once a day to expel all the dangerous air.

Dr. Joseph Lister, a British scientist and surgeon, soon appeared. He didn't believe in the claim that air quality was bad, but instead he began experimenting with infected tissue at home. He found that ordinary fractures usually heal well, while compound fractures (bone pierces the skin) usually lead to infection.

Joseph Lister's solution is to apply a chemical he calls a preservative to the surgical environment before the operation, so that pathogens can be prevented from invading the wound.

html For more than 0 years, people have been laughing at his theory. How can doctors be responsible for these terrible infections? But in the end, the medical community could not refute Lister's results, and his theory was eventually accepted.

Bologna's Marcelo Malpigi was physically attacked due to perceptions of anatomical pathology and his home was burned

Unfortunately, when new ideas are involved, sometimes opponents resort to violence to show their attitude. This is the case with Marcello Malpighi, but he is considered today the father of microanatomy .

Marpigi lived in Italy in the 17th century and studied at University of Bologna . Although his birthplace is unknown, it is recorded that the university did not like him because he was not a Bolognese. (This will be an important and tragic factor in his life.)

After completing his studies, Malpigi traveled to other parts of Italy, where he studied the network of lungs and capillaries, connecting arteries and venules for the first time. He also identified the taste buds for the first time and made revolutionary observations of the brain, optic nerve and red blood cells .

Elsewhere in Italy, Malpiggi's works are widely accepted. However, when he returned to Bologna (usually due to poor health), he was ridiculed and rejected. Soon, this behavior escalated into a personal attack, which eventually led to his house being looted. The destroyer also shattered his microscope, destroyed his books and documents, and eventually burned his home.

Ignaz Semerves was thrown into the madhouse after being ridiculed for many years

Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semerves Most famous in his close relationship with Joseph Lister. The two people have intersections in Europe and are each studying the same thing: bacteria.

Semelves' theory comes from his many years of experience as an obstetrician. In his hospital, he noticed that one ward had a maternal mortality rate twice that of another. The wards with the most deaths were managed by medical students, while the other was managed by midwives. He guessed that the students came in after dissecting the body and must have carried something. So, he asked medical students to wash their hands with chemical solutions before giving birth. After

started washing hands, the maternal mortality rate of dropped from 18% to 1.27%. Semerves quickly transferred this practice to a different ward. When they also adopted his hand washing method, the mortality rate here also began to be about 10% lower than that in the surrounding wards.

Although Hungary accepted this discovery, most European countries did not accept it. They don't understand, so they won't accept the idea of washing their hands differently.

Continuous criticism put a heavy burden on Semervez, and his mental health was seriously affected. At the end of his life, his behavior became unstable (probably due to dementia or syphilis ), and he was taken to a mental hospital.

In a very ironic incident, Semervez was beaten by a mental hospital guard, resulting in a cut and infected hand. Two weeks later, he died of an infection.

American geochemist Claire Cameron Patterson launched a campaign against lead pollution

Have you ever wondered why gasoline at gas stations is called " lead-free "? It's fairly simple to speculate - because it contains no lead, and we're thankful to Claire Cameron Patterson.

Patterson is a young chemist from Iowa who turned his attention to the age of discovering the planet after working for the Manhattan program in the 1940s. His boss, Harrison Brown, asked him to determine the lead content in the rocks, and they will then use the data to determine the age of the earth.

However, when Patterson began to find lead in everything, his experiment changed quickly. He couldn't get a clear reading because there was too much lead in all the compounds around him. Patterson recalled:

I found that there is lead here, and there is lead there, and everything I use contains lead.

After further research, he found that the atmospheric lead concentration is 1,000 times higher than normal level. In addition, the lead content in the human body is 600 times that of the normal level. However, when Patterson shared the data and advocated the removal of lead from gasoline, powerful executives at the oil company argued that lead is actually safe in the fuel.

It was not until the 1980s, nearly 30 years after Patterson began his research that his work was finally accepted and officially changed, removing lead from automotive fuel and many household supplies.

General William Billy Mitchell, accused of disobeying orders for advocating air force and was sent to military court

No one can deny the military power of the aircraft. Today, small drone can blow up entire buildings with missile .However, military officials do not always recognize the importance of aircraft.

After World War I , despite the significant damage to the allies using aircraft, the United States does not believe there is a strong need to establish an air military sector. William Mitchell is a general who strongly opposes this view. During the war, he commanded air forces in France and was able to see their future potential.

Mitchell endlessly lobbying to expand U.S. air military power, and was eventually approved to demonstrate how the aircraft sinks the captured "not sinking" German battleship . But after the simulation was successful, officials accused him of cheating.

Then, when one of the few precious warships of the United States sank, Mitchell was furious. He even wrote to the media:

The brave pilot was sent to death by those admirals who did not care about air safety.

This public statement proved to be the end of Mitchell's military career because he was accused of corrupting the credibility of the army by military courts.

It took the mainstream scientific community many years to accept the discovery of William Harvey . The first scientist to accurately describe the blood circulation of

No matter what historical period, it seems that it is difficult for this world to accept the discovery of medical miracles. William Harvey is an example of this, a British doctor who lived from the late 16th to mid-17th century.

1628, Harvey published his theory on how blood circulates, claiming that blood flows through the heart, not the liver. Due to the works of the second century philosopher and doctor of the Greek Galen , people were not accepted by his new theory.

People consciously continue to choose to follow a theory from more than 1,500 years ago rather than accepting a new theory. So Harvey was so strongly criticized that he became a hermit. It is said that he once said:

Many times, it is much better to grow your wisdom at home and in private than to publish what you have accumulated with infinite wisdom and labor, because it may cause you to lose peace and tranquility for the rest of your life.

Robert Goddard made multi-stage rockets and liquid-fueled rockets, and the media mocked him for wanting to carry manned space travel

Most of us think that the 1950s and 1960s were the era of space travel. In 1957, the first rocket entered space with the Soviet Sputnik satellite. In 1969, Americans walked on the moon.

However, as early as the 1920s, American physicist Robert Goddard was already discussing the Rockets' capabilities. In 1920, he published an article in Popular Science explaining how to use Newton's third law of motion to launch a rocket into space.

Unfortunately for Goddard, many people — even other scientists — do not fully understand what "for every move, there will be an equal and opposite reaction." What does it mean. They believe that because the rocket has no air to push in space, it cannot go anywhere. So the ridicule began.

reaction is so strong that the " New York Times " published an article:

Professor Goddard did not know the connection between the force and the reaction force, nor did he know that there must be something more suitable than a vacuum to carry out the reaction. He seems to lack basic knowledge of high school physics.

Although Goddard tried to defend himself with his research, critics did not relax and eventually brought him out of the public's sight. However, despite criticism, he was able to file for two patents, namely the liquid-fuel rocket and the second- and third-stage rockets using solid-fueled fuel.

Alice Evans's research on pasteurization has largely been overlooked.

The United States in the late 19th century was a very difficult era or place for women, let alone female scientists. And this is the problem Alice Catherine Evans faced in the process of obtaining a master's degree in bacteriology.But she persisted and eventually started working for the USDA, studying bacteria in milk and cheese.

Evans found that eating milk that is not sterilized with pasteurized may cause brucellosis, a bacterial infection. Therefore, she recommends that all milk be pasteurized to eliminate this health risk.

The dairy industry laughed at her claim and ignored her research. As Evans continued to work hard to find further evidence, she accidentally contracted Brucellosis and for the rest of her life, she had been fighting the onset of the disease.

In the past 10 years, the dairy farm managers finally noticed what she said and changed their rules to paste all milk.

Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned alive as a pagan in 1600, just because he believed cosmology

Giordano Bruno had some very great ideas in 16th-century Italy, many of which were about his views on the universe. He not only negated the idea that the earth is the center of the universe, but also went further than scientists who believed that the sun was the center of the universe.

On the contrary, Bruno says that the universe does not have a center—stars are their own sun, surrounded by their own planets and satellites . As we know today, he was extraordinary forward-looking in drawing the universe. However, this is not Bruno's only public idea.

His views on religion are also clear, but many of them are negative. Although he was free to make these bold statements while in Europe, he was arrested for his heretical remarks when he returned to Italy.

During the 7-year trial, Bruno tried to defend his ideals based on philosophy rather than religious teachings. But he failed to prove himself successfully and was sentenced to death in 1600.

Today’s debate surrounding Bruno’s death is whether his astronomy doctrine (especially about the existence of multiple worlds) plays a role in the decision to execute him.

Wright brothers first provided aircraft to the US government, but was repeatedly rejected

Rejection words have different effects on different people. For some, this discourages them, even to the point of giving up. For others, it pushes them instead.

The Wright brothers belong to the latter.

You may be surprised to find that not everyone is happy with the aircraft invented by Orville and Wilber. In fact, despite photos of their successful flight, many people in the early 20th century were unable to understand the idea of human flight.

When the brothers applied to the U.S. government with their invention, they were repeatedly rejected. They want to leave their inventions to their motherland, but their government just doesn't want to cooperate.

Until France began to be keen on the invention, American officials finally showed interest in 1908 - more than five years after Wright's first successful flight.

Nearly two thousand years before Galileo, Greek astronomer Aristarch of Samos proposed a solar system centered on the sun

When we think of scientists who are at the forefront of the times, their correct discovery usually takes decades - perhaps a century to be verified. However, for Aristakus of the Greek astronomer Samos, his discoveries were not recognized for nearly 1,700 years.

He lived in 300 BC and was the first to claim that the sun rather than the earth was the center of the solar system. This will also make the universe much bigger than anyone thinks.

Aristaks's views were denied by his colleagues. Not only do they cannot imagine the possibility of a huge universe, they are also unwilling to believe that our world is not the center of the universe.

There are also other philosophers and astronomers trying to confirm Aristakus' theory - most famously Galileo, who was also criticized for the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, and even in the last nine years of his life, he was under house arrest for heresy.

Aristaks was not proven to be correct until the emergence of Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th century.