Welcome to the Critical Skills Blog, home to over a thousand human-generated articles—never AI—on topics that matter to continuous education. To find articles of interest, use the “Search” tab. Please feel free to comment, and please subscribe. All content on this site is free.
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How Healthcare Changed – 04 – The Cost of Clean
They celebrated the pus. In the Victorian operating ward, the thick matter that rose in a wound had a name — laudable pus — and surgeons welcomed it as healing, while their patients died three weeks after the knife. In 1867 Joseph Lister read Pasteur, made a leap the Frenchman… More⇢
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In the Arena – Ignaz Semmelweis – He Was Right and That Was Not Enough
n Vienna in 1846, one maternity ward was three times as deadly as the ward beside it — and the mothers knew. Some gave birth in the street rather than be sent to the doctors. Ignaz Semmelweis found the reason: the doctors themselves were carrying death from the dead house… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 03 – The Idea That Remade Medicine
A nineteenth-century surgeon’s coat was black so the stains would not show, and he wore it stiff with the dried filth of a hundred past patients — proudly, as a badge of experience, never knowing it carried death from one body to the next. The history of germ theory is… More⇢
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Women History Wrote Out – 03 – The Manifesto in His Collected Works
She chose her own name as an act of theory — folding her mother’s surname into her own because a woman erased into her husband’s line was a woman erased. Then, around 1907, she wrote the first great structural critique of patriarchy in Chinese thought: that the oppression of women… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – We Are All Bound Up Together
Courage: telling allies the truth they do not want to hear. In May 1866, the poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper stood before the most powerful white suffragists in America and refused their bargain — the vote for women, bought by leaving Black Americans behind. She told them her sex would… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 02 – The Day the Pain Ended
Before 1846, a surgeon’s greatest skill was speed, because every second of cutting was a second his patient spent screaming, awake and held down. Then, on October 16 of that year, a Boston dentist named William Morton put a patient to sleep with ether, and the surgeon cut into a… More⇢
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Women History Wrote Out – 02 – The Voice That Left the Palace
A girl born into a family just out of slavery, given a name that meant slave. A palace music sealed in Arabic and reserved for a sultan’s court. She took it, sang it in the people’s language, filled it with the truth about the powerful — and made the defining… More⇢
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The Ads That . . . . Created Their Customer
Great advertising is not persuasion—it is authorship. The most powerful campaigns in American history did not find a customer and sell to him; they used words to invent a person who did not yet exist, then made the purchase the proof of belonging. This essay ranks the five ads that… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Floated Into Every American Home
For a hundred years Procter & Gamble told the world that Ivory floated by accident — a worker forgot to shut off the mixer. Then, in 2004, the company’s own archivist went into the files and found a chemist’s notebook from 1863 proving it was deliberate, and P&G let him… More⇢
Meet Your Host – Charlie Jett
Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He developed the Field Studies methodology to teach “Critical Skills” and was endorsed by the Department of Labor in 1994. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts three podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog and Civic Sage platforms on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
