The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I do not really kill anything. I simply refuse to let the dirt stay put.
One end of me loves water and the other end cannot bear it.
A doctor who told his colleagues to use me was mocked, dismissed, and died in an asylum.
I am made by boiling fat with something caustic.
A bar, a lather, and clean hands.
Soap
Semmelweis showed in 1847 that washing hands cut deaths on his ward dramatically. His profession rejected him, and it took Pasteur's germ theory to prove him right after he was dead.
A soap molecule has two ends, one that bonds with water and one that will not, so it surrounds a droplet of grease and lets the whole package be rinsed away. It does not need to kill anything. Ignaz Semmelweis demonstrated in 1847 that doctors washing their hands between the dissection room and the maternity ward cut deaths from around eighteen per cent to two, and was met with offence rather than gratitude — he was suggesting that gentlemen were carrying death on their hands. He was dismissed, declined, and died in an asylum two decades before Pasteur made his case for him.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #52 · today's mystery · the vault
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