The 3 paradoxes of progress
-ineffectual progress, immoral progress, progress postponed- are still at work...
The Invisible World.
The failure of the nascent scientific community to recognize the significance of Leeuwenhook's discoveries
is the most important of all mysteries involved in the history of microscopy...
There was no need to wait more than a 150 years for Lister,
any more there was any need to wait 150 years for von Baer.
From 1546 to the early 1720s there was a lively intellectual tradition debate in animate contagion...
Here too, time stood still...
Hippocratic therapies survived into the 1920s.
Why was progress so slow? We need to look elsewhere for an explanantion.
Part of the explanation lies in the way in which people identify with their own skills,
particularly when they have gone great trouble and expensure to acquire them..
Another part of the explanantion lies in the risk asociated pursuing new ideas...
It is easy to see: There were psychological and cultural factors working against innovation...
Individuals and institutions are naturally conservative and risk averse...
they prefer the known to the unknown, continuity to change"
D.Wootton: bad medicine