Harry Blockman

Every name on this list was told the science was settled. Every one of them was right. Most were punished first. James Lind, 1747: scurvy came from bad air and idleness, said the Navy. He put twelve sailors on six treatments and proved it was citrus. The Admiralty acted forty-eight years later, one year after he died. Ignaz Semmelweis, 1847: doctors walked from the autopsy table to the delivery room without washing. He made them use chlorinated lime and deaths in his ward fell from eighteen per cent to two. His profession took it as an accusation, drove him out, and he died in an asylum of sepsis. Alfred Wegener, 1912: continents do not move. He said they had. Geology laughed for fifty years and he died on the Greenland ice long before anybody stopped. Joseph Goldberger, 1914: pellagra was infectious and every physician in America knew it. He proved it was diet, then swallowed material from infected patients in front of them to show it was not catching. He never fell ill. Nor did his wife, who volunteered. Barbara McClintock, 1951: genes sit still on the chromosome. She showed they move, to a silent room, then stopped publishing on it for decades. She took the Nobel alone at eighty-one. Frances Kelsey, 1960: a morning sickness drug landed on her desk at the FDA with thin safety data. The company pressed her six times. She refused six times, and thalidomide never reached America. John Yudkin, 1972: fat was the killer, said the entire field. He named sugar in print. His career was dismantled by the men with the rival theory, and his book returned from the dead forty years later. Bernard Fisher, 1970s: the radical mastectomy had been standard for eighty years. He proved the lesser operation matched it, and spared a generation of women a mutilation nobody needed. Barry Marshall, 1984: ulcers are caused by stress. He drank a flask of the bacteria, gave himself the disease, cured it with antibiotics, and collected the Nobel twenty-one years later. Christopher Ramsden, 2016: the largest diet trial ever run had gone unpublished since the seventies. He found the boxes in a dead researcher's basement. The men who swapped saturated fat for corn oil had lower cholesterol and more funerals. None of them had better equipment than the people they were arguing with. They had the same data as everybody else and the stomach to be hated for reading it properly. Consensus is a headcount. Every name above lost the vote.