Scientific foreknowledge in the bible
There are many reasons I trust my bible as a Christian woman and health care provider. Scientific foreknowledge happens to be just one of them. Today we will explore an example of scientific foreknowledge, with an example of medical wisdom in the Bible that stands the test of time and is evidence as to why we should never be afraid to question the medical system.
The year is 1847 and you wake up in Vienna Austria. You walk into the Vienna General Hospital and pass by the nurses station to see busy nurses at work.
You enter the hospital morgue and witness medical students with their sleeves rolled up, assessing the corpse of a young pregnant woman. Standing over the students you see the lead Doctor, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. He turns to one of the interns and asks:
“How many women passed away last night?”
With tears in his eyes, the intern replies, “three... as he lists their names...”Dr. Semmelweis ponders, “Admission, delivery, and death, is that our new motto? One out of six women who comes here to deliever ends up on the autopsy table, I will not accept this.”
The medical students squirm in their chairs, feeling at a loss for what is happening. They continue their assignment for the day, using bare hands, the students perform autopsies on each corpse. They notice a common factor: pus filling their chests, eye sockets, and abdomen. The diagnosis is always the same: “Labor fever...”
After the autopsies, the common practice was to rinse their bloody hands and wipe them dry on a towel, and return to the maternity ward to round on the patients with the stench of rotting flesh left on their hands...
The students go from bed to bed, performing their same assessments and completing internal exams. Dr. Semmelweis watches them and teaches as they round. Suddenly, he contemplates on a pattern...
After their hands had previously been in the dead bodies, filled with pus, they were then inserting their hands into the pregnant women during their assessments, without fully washing their hands.
This was the standard practice of the time in Europe.
No one knew about the existence of bacteria.
But that was about to change as Dr. Semmelweis pauses his rounds and orders the interns to wash their hands...At first the interns thought it was a joke, but knowing the character of Dr. Semmelweis (not much of joker) they listened.
Dr. Semmelweis watches as they wash their hands in chlorinated water. He smells their hands to make sure the stench of rotting flesh is gone. His gut feeling was that the cause of labor fever was due to the transmission of bacteria from the hands of the interns who were performing internal exams on the dead and living pregnant women.
To us, this seems obvious. But in their timeline, it seemed absurd, Semmelweis expressed his findings connecting patterns like:
If a doctor delivers the baby, the death rate is 18 %, if a midwife delivers it is 3%. Physicians did autopsies, midwives did not.
His friend and colleague died from an infected cut after performing an autopsy on a woman with labor fever.
He even documented his findings in a book, connecting clear patterns.
When Semmelweis implemented hand washing among his students, history tells us labor fever virtually disappeared from the labor ward. The death rate fell from 18 to 1 percent His findings were eventually published in a medical journal. But no one took him seriously. In fact, his colleagues and doctors during his time laughed, mocked him, and labeled him as crazy and he ended up in a psyche ward.
Turns out Semmelweis was right.
He discovered a truth that would eventually change medicine and save the lives of many once it was embraced: it is critical to isolate the dead bodies from healthy bodies and practice good hand washing. He was not the only one to discover these findings.
The concept of antisepsis (cleansing) was not taken seriously in obstetric practice until the 1880s, when the role of bacteria had been discovered and the use of antisepsis in surgery had become common practice, influenced by a man named Joseph Lister (1827–1912).
But the thing is, this concept that cleansing is helpful to prevent disease and death did not originate with either of these men.
Thousands of years earlier, God told Moses:
“Whoever touches any dead body will be off limits for seven days” Numbers 19:11
If you were declared “off-limits” you had to take a shower of cleansing before reentering the community.
and...
In Leviticus 12, no one was allowed to touch a new mother for an entire week. Some feminists today call this “patriarchal,” but as both a Christian woman and a Health Practitioner, I believe medical wisdom is catching up to the fact that it was God’s protection, provision, and a gift for the mother to bond with her new baby.
Hand washing in biblical times is another example of medical wisdom:
Hyssop was used in cleansing practices, on all furnishings and on those who touched the dead (Numbers 19:18) and today we know contains natural antimicrobial properties (PMID: 24786688).
Two pieces of wisdom I believe we can learn from this example:
This should be a reminder that medical dogma and the refusal to question common practices, “even though they have been done this way for years,” especially when presented with new information, kills people and leads to unnecessary suffering. During the early history of medicine, handwashing was not a practice that was widely acknowledged, it was laughed at and only connected with religious and “magical” or “woo woo” practices.
The Bible has provided remedies for many types of diseases for years, Modern science is simply rediscovering biblical wisdom.
Curious about the intricacies of your human body and not afraid to question the current medical paradigm?
Join my wife Megan inside her exclusive community inside The Aligned and Renewed Monthly Wellness Collective, where she seamlessly integrates functional medicine, spiritual formation, the biology of trauma and nervous system regulation, all while staying grounded in biblical wisdom, to help Christian women reclaim their vitality.
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Or read articles on apologetics for Christian women on her website here.
Resources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6270679/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9632745/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3807776/
Her favorite book on this topic.
