Conviction
When You Are Right Before the World Is Ready Conviction is not loudness. It is the quiet, costly, often lonely decision to keep doing the thing you believe is right while the world has not yet caught up. Sometimes the world never catches up in your lifetime. You do the work anyway. In 1847, a young Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis was working in Vienna's General Hospital. The hospital had two maternity wards. One was staffed by doctors and medical students. The other was staffed by midwives. Mortality in the doctors' ward was running near 18 percent. In the midwives' ward, it was closer to 2 percent. Healthy women were checking in to deliver babies and dying of "childbed fever" within days. Semmelweis figured it out before germ theory had a name. The doctors were performing autopsies in the morning and delivering babies in the afternoon without washing their hands. He proposed a simple intervention: a basin of chlorinated lime water at the door of t...