cytaty z książek autora "Christopher Hamlin"
One job of historians of science is to explain why what seems obvious was not.
(...) prudence, practicality, and flexibility did not constitute hypocrisy.
Persons count when they can be counted and are required to be accounted for.
Efforts to learn from dissection could be read as orchestrated killing to get cadavers.
Much easier to fit problem to bureaucracy than adapt bureaucracy to problem; that would require lengthy and uncertain investigation.
While states could act boldly, the problem in towns was to act at all.
There is an irony here. For most of a century the vigorous response to cholera had exceeded what science could warrant. That response to cholera had been part of a wave of moral, social, and sanitary reform, part of a great clamor for human freedom. Action had gone far beyond knowledge. Now there was knowledge, but the indicated action exceeded political possibility. You could stop cholera, but people would not like it, and it would not pay, and it would inconvenience trade. That century of struggle had only revealed the indomitable rule of capital.
Speculation was the poison of all reasoning.
Without sound theory, the mere collection of facts will as likely obscure as illuminate.
Coincidences abound in large populations. To find a hypothesis-confirming link does not rule out other links that one has not sought.
Only rarely does the new knowledge drive out the older; it does show it as oversimplyfied. And there is less certainty.