Sometimes, it’s you
Today’s post comes to us from the story of a 19th-century doctor: [acp author=”Imre Zoltán” title=”Ignaz Semmelweis” id=”Brit-1″ url=”https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ignaz-Semmelweis” media=”website” publisher=”Encylopedia Britannica” day=”19″ month=”August” year=”2019″ day_access=”10″ month_access=”January” year_access=”2020″]{title}[/acp]. Dr. Semmelweis was an obstetrician in Vienna who obtained his degree in 1844 and was appointed assistant at the obstetric clinic in Vienna’s General Hospital.
There were two wards at the clinic. One was staffed by doctors and trainees. The other was staffed by midwives. Dr. Semmelweis began to study a problem known as puerperal (or childbed) fever. We know this today to be caused by germs, but Dr. Semmelweis lived only a few years before “germ theory” caught on.
What he noticed was that women in the ward staffed by doctors and medical students died at a rate nearly five times higher than women in the midwives’ ward [acp author=”Rebecca Davis” title=”Health Shots: The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing And Briefly Saved Lives” id=”NPR-1″ url=”https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives” media=”website” publisher=”National Public Radio” day=”12″ month=”January” year=”2015″ day_access=”10″ month_access=”January” year_access=”2020″]({author}, {year})[/acp].
Dr. Semmelweis tried everything that he could to even up the odds. Everything that the midwives were doing in their ward they started doing in the doctors’ and medical students’ ward. They changed how priests went through the wards to tend to the sick and dying. Anything that they could think of, they tried. And nothing worked.
Then, a pathologist died after getting a pin-prick while doing an autopsy on body of a woman who had died of childbed fever. It was then that something struck Dr. Semmelweis: doctors and medical students were performing autopsies on the dead first thing in the morning and then going to “help” the living after the autopsies were done. So, Dr. Semmelweis hypothesized that the doctors were taking some part of cadavers with them which were then causing the mothers to fall ill. He had people start washing their hands and instruments with a chlorine solution.
Death rates plummeted. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the mortality rates in the doctors’ and students’ ward dropped from 18.27 to 1.27 percent, and in March and August of 1848, no woman died in childbirth there.
So, what does this have to do with policy and email deliverability? Dr. Semmelweis faced a lot of opposition from his fellow doctors. They refused to believe that they could be the cause of the spread of illness.
People make changes to policies and processes and then fail to recognize that those changes can result in issues. Just a few weeks ago, someone asked a question about changes to delivery at a certain domain. A couple of days later they reported back that someone had made a small change to some small thing which they did not think mattered. When everyone was hunting for the reason why things were worse than they were before, they had remained silent because their change could not have been the reason.
Just like with the doctors who were spreading disease, however unintentionally, sometimes it really is you. Always remain ready to look at everything and see what is working and what is not. When you convince yourself that it really could not be you, that will be when you find problems to be intractable.