From Socrates To Van Gogh: Crackpots In Life, Heroes In Death (PHOTOS)

It happens in every generation: someone comes up with ideas that look crazy but turn out to be genius. When do they get the recognition? After they're dead. During life they are shunned and criticized, after death, lionized. Will we ever catch up to them? Who do you think is considered crazy but way ahead of their time right now? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Ignaz Semmelweis (July 1, 1818 - August 13, 1865)

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Semmelweis had the insight that if doctors washed their hands between procedures it would drastically cut the death from infection in hospitals. His idea was ignored and he died in an asylum at 47. Only after his death and the advent of germ theory did this practice become accepted as reducing mortality.

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Semmelweis had the insight that if doctors washed their hands between procedures it would drastically cut the death from infection in hospitals. His idea was ignored and he died in an asylum at 47.

Only after his death and the advent of germ theory did this practice become accepted as reducing mortality.

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Total comments: 105 | Post a Comment

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This Crackpot Genius

Rank #2  |  Average: 4

He didn't deserve the criticism he received! He WAS a crackpot!

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Comments

[Beyond the Bookshelf]

07:31 AM on 04/18/2011

Isn't that something. Great Minds at work and no one notices until it's too late. I think that is normal and is largely due to honest successors. Someone else carried the idea through but still gave credit to the deceased idea-maker - even in death. That is very noble.

Stieg Larrson was phenomenal. It's a shame his family and lover are fighting over the rights to the last millennium series book - we may never get to see it.

See great book reviews and news at www.beyondthebookshelf.com

[Cliff Rothband]

04:52 AM on 05/06/2011

Some think inteligence is arriving at a conclusion based on past experiences. But that is prejudice. Real inteligence is free thought. The problem is that the majority usually view free thought with negative prejudice.

[Howard53545]

05:27 AM on 04/16/2011

You forgot Oscar Wilde and writers of color.

[Lee Wells]

04:41 AM on 04/16/2011

You forgot Linus Pauling oopps i guess getting 2 nobel prizes means you aren't a crackpot to some people....

[norskenr]

02:10 PM on 04/15/2011

I heard a much more intriguing version of Socrates' death - which is in a way consistent with Old Claudius' comment. I heard that the (local) Greek government actually wanted Socrates to escape and go away. They left the jail open. He wouldn't. In fact, he argued that they should award him a lifetime pension and a free home. In the end, they poisoned him because he insisted he wanted them to. Saying he was a fictional character actually makes it easier to believe...well, if it didn't really "happen", then that this was the "original version." In the end, it makes it easier not to care at all.

[pvbeachbum]

10:38 AM on 04/30/2011

i'll let you know when i finish reading "The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life."

[JLeamer]

01:12 AM on 04/15/2011

I'll vote for Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.

[bmsartic]

10:23 PM on 04/14/2011

Is info overload just another version of white noise....im a newbie and wow...I thought an evening of cable news channel switching was paralyzing, sigh, anyway, I will get the hang of it,,,,,,otherwise it will hang me

[Old Claudius]

08:49 PM on 04/14/2011

Socrates was a literary fiction, not a person. He was known to be a literary creation when "Plato" (whoever and however many "Plato" was) created him, and was popular as such, in part because his physical description and character were satirically based on one of the 'Pantheon' that was believed in by the average (who the Plato types were 'more sophisticated' than.

The "Death" of Socrates is a rhetorical literary exercise. A fiction of the fictional character's fictional demise, deliberate, undertaken in steadfast loyalty to an espoused philosophic idea idealized.

Socrates is a "person" only in modern imagination, for our education system having become unaware he was a literary creation, and having assigned "him" to have really existed.

[Jokergirl]

08:23 PM on 04/14/2011

Many people think that Van Gogh went insane but he had a terrible battle with epileptic seizures, (not known what type of seizures they were at the time though) that's where the whole "cut off his ear thing" came from, he did it during a seizure according to art historians. Gailileo it's too bad he went blind by literally studying the sun through a telescope. Some brilliant minds surely.

[ejenks]

07:25 PM on 04/14/2011

Disappointed by the utter lack of Tesla.

[Old Claudius]

08:16 PM on 04/14/2011

Tesla was very successful, and recognized, in his lifetime. He had patents and contracts worth millions, which he signed away to Westinghouse during one of the financial crises that were characteristic of the robber-baron era, and died more or less in poverty because Westinghouse, after surviving the attack that initiated the crisis and becoming rich and successful did not reciprocate Tesla's generosity.

[Robin Yonash]

07:08 PM on 04/14/2011

My favorite isn't listed. Alfred Lothar Wegener (November 1, 1880 – November 1930) was a German scientist, geophysicist, and meteorologist. He is most notable for his theory of continental drift (Kontinentalverschiebung), proposed in 1912, which hypothesized that the continents were slowly drifting around the Earth. However, Wegener was unable to demonstrate a mechanism for continental drift, which, combined with his mostly circumstantial evidence, meant that his hypothesis was not accepted until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries provided evidence of continental drift (now plate tectonics)

[getalong]

04:12 PM on 04/14/2011

I'll give credit to Ignaz Semmelweis, absolutely. But Galen was using sterilization processes for surgery back in Ancient Rome. There were other doctors long before Semmelweis who knew that something like germs existed and how to counter them. They just never actually had a means to prove it is all.

[Donnat]

04:08 PM on 04/14/2011

This is what Glenn Beck is counting on.

[Kzinga]

02:46 PM on 04/14/2011

Which makes the world turn? E= hv or E = mc2

[Kzinga]

02:42 PM on 04/14/2011

The worthless money and enduced slavery suppresses my abilities.

Also you cant patent a perpetual motion, only the math that creates it

[Fattonecat]

02:27 PM on 04/14/2011

Miles Davis

[sdgrrl]

02:45 PM on 04/14/2011

I see your Miles Davis and go all in with His Grace Duke Ellington ;)

[Fattonecat]

02:49 PM on 04/14/2011

Ha ! I got a pair of bluesmen and the best female vocalist of all time for a high card !!!

[Fattonecat]

02:55 PM on 04/14/2011

:)