¶ In the current New Yorker, Atul Gawande tells a handful of very important stories — which, like all good stories, show that there is no substitute for personal presence in human interaction. There’s some interesting Gestalt, too. Both points appear in the following passage, about surgeons, their initial resistance to antiseptics, and how that resistance was overcome.

Surgeons finally did upgrade their antiseptic standards at the end of the nineteenth century. But, as is often the case with new ideas, the effort required deeper changes than anyone had anticipated. In their blood-slick, viscera-encrusted black coats, surgeons had seen themselves as warriors doing hemorrhagic battle with little more than their bare hands. A few pioneering Germans, however, seized on the idea of the surgeon as scientist. They traded in their black coats for pristine laboratory whites, refashioned their operating rooms to achieve the exacting sterility of a bacteriological lab, and embraced anatomic precision over speed.

The key message to teach surgeons, it turned out, was not how to stop germs but how to think like a laboratory scientist. Young physicians from America and elsewhere who went to Germany to study with its surgical luminaries became fervent converts to their thinking and their standards. They returned as apostles not only for the use of antiseptic practice (to kill germs) but also for the much more exacting demands of aseptic practice (to prevent germs), such as wearing sterile gloves, gowns, hats, and masks. Proselytizing through their own students and colleagues, they finally spread the ideas worldwide.

What we’ve left out — you’ll read all about it in the article — is the distinction between innovations that yield startling, immediate results, and innovations whose effects appear only outside the scope of those who need to make them. Anaesthetics instantly made surgery easy for surgeons. Antiseptics meant that patients didn’t die a week later, somewhere else.

You’ll find out what “seven touches” means, too.

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