Vagabonder

I wasn't sure where this belongs, as it could probably go in E/C or S&S, so I'm putting it in neither.

I got an e-mail from a fundie today in response to some stuff I gave him regarding how the knowledge from evolutionary biology and common decent helps us find treatments for disease. His response was as follows,
I didn't really know where to begin with searching out the veracity of the claim regarding blood and sterilization (plus I'm heading to bed now), and was hoping you folks could lend some insight. Thanks!

Cheers

ETA: In retrospect, I should have just put it in S&S

Berthold

Empirical practitioners of medicine and biology were the pioneers.

Joseph Lister, Ignaz Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch.

post tenebras lux

I'd blame Ignaz Semmelweis for it as well: at his place of work the medics used to do the autopsies on the dead mothers-to-be first and then go and check the still living ones, whilst the nuns ignored the dead and only looked after the live ones. Rather than assuming it was the divine keeping the nuns' patients alive, he wondered what would happen if the medics bothered to wash their hands after cutting up dead bodies but before fondling the live ones.

As for christianity's view on it, I found this on wiki whilst trying to remember Ignaz ....

Dean Anderson

Moved to S&S

anthrosciguy

Good thing the Great Flood predated Christianity and Noah's bunch weren't same or he wouldn't have been able to take his whole family aboard.

braces_for_impact

Sometimes this stuff really makes me laugh. Has this guy even read the bible? Particularly the parts about menstrual blood being unclean, or the cure for leprosy?

arricchio

Vagabonder,
Here's a project for your fundie friend. Ask him look to up the works of Louis Pasteur. They're are available online here. Have him do a word search on the words, "God", and "Bible". Then ask him to count the number of times they occur. Hint: a calculator won't be neccessary.
Next have him repeat the exercise for Joseph Lister's work here

arricchio

And another thing.

Christian scholars have been interested in the cause of disease since the early medieval period. But even then they did not rely on the Bible as a source of authority where the cause or treatment of disease is concerned.

For example, Isidore of Seville included an entire section on medicine in his Etymologies. Isidore was aware that diseases could be contracted either by physical contact ("contagium" is the Latin word as best I can recall) or through the air ("pestilencia"). I believe this is as close to a germ theory of disease as the ancients ever came. However, these are ideas that Isidore got from secular sources like Hippocrates, Galen and Celsus - not from the Bible. Interestingly, although Isidore was a monk and a scholar, he virtually never quotes from the Bible as an authority on the subject of disease. He certainly never quoted the verse about the impurity of blood.

uberhobo

I heard a funny story about sanitation in surgery many years ago at a historical reenactment. Apparently when soldiers would get wounded in action they would be taken to the field hospital where bullets would be removed and broken limbs reset and the like. But the mortality rate for officers was always higher than that for the enlisted men. The reason for this was that the surgeons would take their time with the officers to make sure they were doing things right, and in doing so, kept them open for longer and exposed them to infection more than the lowly grunt on the next operating table.

B Cereus

+1 on what everybody else has said.

This sort of thing drives me nuts. If you read the Bible, it is very clear that the writers have no idea or understanding of the microbiological world. If they did, there would be sanitization measures described for drinking water, food preparation and handling, human waste disposal, and medical procedures and disease prevention. A lot of sanitization procedures do not require any high-tech equipment and were well within the technology and capability of people during biblical times (boiling your drinking water, for example).

Please ask your fundie correspondent to cite exactly from the Bible where it is stated that sterilization prevents infection.

Note that people die much more frequently from contaminated food and water (especially infants), than from infectious blood.

I would also add that the concept of "sterilization" makes no sense if you know nothing about microbiology.