[0681] Heroes
└ posted on Thursday, 7 May 2015, by Novil
- Sandra: We all know the worst mass murderers in history. But far too few people know the heroes who saved the most lives.
- Caption: Ignaz Semmelweis, Hungarian physician at the Vienna General Hospital, discovered in 1847 that the incidence of childbed fever could be drastically cut by the use of diligent hand disinfection.
- Physician: A gentleman’s hands are never dirty!
- Ignaz Semmelweis: I beg to differ.
- Caption: During the Massacre of Nanking in 1938, German businessman John Rabe established safety zones that sheltered over 200,000 Chinese citizens from the Japanese army.
- John Rabe: Would you let go for a moment? I need to go to the bathroom.
- Caption: Stanislav Petrov, lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces, may have prevented a nuclear war in 1983 when he correctly identified the launch of five American nuclear missiles as a false alarm of the Soviet’s early warning system.
- Stanislav Petrov: No, no! These aren’t nuclear missiles! These are just weather balloons!
- Yury Votintsev: Hmm…
Good is rarely newsworthy whereas bad news is grist to the mill of the various media.
(Still want to know what that box with Woo saying “LOOK” is about. Never seen anything in it.)
Because we always talk about those who did the worst, but we tend to forget those who did the best. And there are plenty of those.
Dampflok wrote:
Advertising banners. But they’re disabled for you since you’re logged in as a patron.
@ Dampflok:
There should be an add at the left of the pic. I think that those who are from Patreon are add-free?
@ Novil:
Thank you. (^_^)
@ Novil:
It is literally saying “Look! No Ads for you!”
Not just heroes, but largely unsung heroes. After all, how many people had heard of Oskar Schindler before that film came out – and his effort was pretty much small fry compared to the three featured here.
I’d remembered reading about Petrov sometime during secondary school, but the others I’m just learning about.
Yay for the unsung heroes of history!
I suspect that Novil is running dry on the idea pool for story arcs…
But I suppose it is nice to have some nice calm, refreshing faith restoration in humanity.
Don’t forget Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who hid, gave shelter and transported back to safety millions of jews who were stuck in Portugal during the WW2 😀
“Back at base, bugs in the software,
flash the message “something’s out there”,
floating in the summer sky,
ninety nine red balloons go by”
Good one! People like that deserve praise. With all the mistakes they too might have had, their courage and actions are well suited as a role model for all of us.
@ Lukkai:
Mistakes they made, and flaws they had obviously. Should concentrate a bit more on my writing and less on the tv.
You really should have included Norman Ernest Borlaug, his work in brining high yield agriculture is credited with saving over a billion lives.
@ DiamondSentinel:
Nah. I suspect that Novil might be pacing to build up for something big again.
I have to say it is great to see the people who did good, we mostly just foucus on bad things these days.
Though in the tags it says geghis khan. I don’t like how people potray him as a villian, he had on of the greatest empires of all time. And it wasn’t bad, the citzens were happy and they encorged science and schooling.
It’s nice to see appreciated for Semmelweis. I’ll admit to reading about him in a book more focused on economics, but it was a really good story that showed that even the best in the field can make huge mistakes. No one’s perfect, and that’s nice to know.
@ Questiontroll:
And burned and looted the Ottoman Empire, dumping so many books into their river, it ran black with ink for weeks. “I am the wrath of God, and the scourge of the heavens! You must have done something terrible to deserve a punishment like me!”
But let us not also forget that Gengis Khan made the most lives. *Wink wink nudge nudge
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
William Shakespeare
And these men tend to Prove that.
As does the fact that the movies: “Psycho”, “Silence of the Lambs” and “The Texas Chainsaw Masscacre” were all based on the Same Serial Killer.
wonderful strip. historical and comedic.
The kind of history people Should be taught about.
Ooh, I like this! Very true and nicely done!
Respect
Nobody has mentioned Dr René Spitz who saved the lives of thousands of infants at the foundling hospital he was appointed to.
Spitz discovered that the infants were dying at a rate far above the national average for no known reason.
First, Spitz tried instigating a regime of strict feeding times, thinking that perhaps the infants were not being fed properly, but there was no significant change to the death rate.
Next, he tried making sure the infants had their nappies/diapers changed promptly and that they were bathed regularly, thinking that perhaps this was the cause. Again, there was little change to the death rate.
Thirdly, Spitz ensured that the infants received the best medical care possible and proper medicine, thinking that perhaps this aspect of their care had been neglected, but still there was only a minor reduction in the death rate.
Finally, in desperation Spitz did the unexpected. He ordered the nurses to take the time to pick up and cuddle the infants for a while each day.
The death rate of the infants plummeted until it was only a little higher than the national average.
A silent film about a related later study by the same doctor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvdOe10vrs4
I should point out here that Dr Spitz did not conduct any experiments on children. He merely observed and studied things which were already being done, and their results. His studies led to drastic changes in child-care in order to prevent the tragic results which he had observed and reported on.
Very nice! (And for the record, a John Rabe movie came out a few years ago. It wasn’t “Schindler’s List”, but I rather liked it.)
For another example, how about Jonas Salk? Developed a vaccine for polio, refused to patent it.
Brilliant, succinct, and very, very awesome. I knew there was a reason I like this comic, and it’s not just the brilliant writing and excellent line-art. Sometimes you just get the best ideas for strips!
@ Questiontroll:
True….I would’ve put Pol Pot in place of Ghengis, but people may not have recognized him as easily.
As for the examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
sun tzu wrote:
I think Louis Pasteur who developed vaccination process would beat him…
What of Fritz Haber, principally responsible for feeding literally HALF of the people on Earth? (Also war criminal, but that’s only because his side lost… If Germany had won the “Great War,” there likely would have been no WW-2, and no Holocaust, but I digress.)
Aaaand you just lost a bunch of Japanese readers 🙂
(Good riddance, in their case…)
Big thumbs up fur the Semmelweis panel. He is remembered in Hungary as the ‘Saviour of mothers’, and rightly so.
Vonnegut called him his personal hero, although the anecdote about him killing himself to prove his right is untrue…
This is a great comic!
I suggest Gengis Khan is included not just for the number of deaths, but the percentage of world population of the time that were killed by his hordes, and the wanton destruction they brought with them everywhere they conquered.
You would have to look at the actions of Hitler’s armies in Poland, Belarus etc. to come close.
As for people saved, it would have to be the likes of Pasteur…how many lives saved by the eradication of Polio, for example?
Countless…
@ Novil:
For sone reason it also doesn’t show up in my mobile safari. On a related topic, have you considered putting a banner under it to persuade the Adblock users to deactivate it for your site?
What about the man who saved a billion lives? started the green revolution, bought us more time etc.
@ pretty flacko:
Not stuck in Portugal, he sent to Portugal the jews stuck in Germany. Until the Portuguese government stripped him of his functions, took his family and all he had and left him to die in extreme poverty. He actually saved more Jews than Schindler, but Hollywood never made a movie about him and Portuguese movies are rarely seen, even in Portugal.
@ Andre:
I meant stuck in France, not Germany.
Dampflok wrote:
There’s usually an ad there, but if you have AdBlock (or similar), or I think if you’re logged in as a patron, there’s nothing there.
Personally, I disable AdBlock on Sandra and Woo (and my other favourite webcomics!)
I’m not a patron, and I don’t use AdBlock, but I’m still not seeing anything in the box.
@ Gaz Wilmbroke:
A few years back there was a Discovery Channel feature about the incident Stanislaw Petrov was involved in. I’m not sure it gave his name. The incident hit home directly with me because at the time I was somewhere in the North Atlantic aboard a US Ballistic Missile sub. Had Petrov not intervened, we would have failed at our primary mission.
Two of these I might have read on Cracked
Jerry wrote:
The SAME serial killer? Who?
I think the point that Novil is trying to make is the heroic nature of the people he highlighted – not just that they saved lives..
Granted Pasteur’s and Salk”s efforts saved lived but they were only following their career choices – they did not risk their own lives or reputations in what they did.
Some years ago I read about the narrowly averted nuclear holocaust and thought it just too bizarre to be true. Little did I know in 1983 (Sep 26), just how close to annihilation I was (I lived and worked just south of LA, a prime target, I’m sure).
It is real scary to realize how close to disaster we were and how only a single heroic person and a bit of blind luck averted it. Stanislav Petrov was one of many officers charged with monitoring the missile alert system but he was the only one with civilian training. Had it been any other person on duty (all military, all trained to just blindly follow the rules), the alert would have forwarded up a command chain that was primed to shoot first and ask later. (Those were very tense times!)
As it was, with only minutes to act, he was under tremendous pressure – delay warning of a real attack and millions of his countrymen would die.
The only reason he gave for over riding the warning was that the system said only five missiles were launched – not the massive attack he would have expected if real. Although he did not have the authority to launch a counter attack himself, he knew that those that did were on such a hair trigger mode that a counter attack would surely follow his notification. To trust one’s own judgement in the face of all that is truly heroic.
It is also interesting (and scary), to learn that on Oct 27, 1962, another nuclear attack by a Russian submarine near Cuba was narrowly averted by a single person. I suspect that Russia is not the only nuclear armed country with flaky safeguards (US included). And THAT is scary!
Yarner wrote:
Nope, because we are not as narrow minded as certain people… And why is it “good ridance” if the japanese readers are gone? I thought hate speak was forbidden here.
@ Intelligence:
Ed Gein. None of the stories referenced actually follow Gein’s story, but Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, and Leatherface were all inspired by Gein. Gein probably wasn’t actually a serial killer – he’s only known to have killed 2 women – but is known to have skinned both his victims, and robbed a number of graves, making a ‘woman suit’ to ‘become his mother’ (as well as a number of other objects). His mother obsession inspired Norman Bates, and the use of skins inspired Buffalo Bill and Leatherface.
Why would they lose japenese readers in the first place, i think people can admit thier ancestors mistakes.
@ Yarner:
@ Novil:
That reminded me to turn off adblock on this website. Thanks~
Hey it’s that guy!
…how come the first three all have facial hair?