You are a doctor in the late 1940s. During a routine procedure, your patient's heart suddenly stops beating. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?

You stop whatever you were doing, whip out your jack knife, crack open the poor soul's chest cavity and manually squeeze the heart to pump blood through the body. Doesn't matter if you're a cardiac specialist or an ophthalmologist. You get in there and massage the heart or you start working on how you're going to explain this to the bereaved.

This was the standard forever EVER, until cardiologist Paul Zoll won hearts everywhere with his external pacemaker in 1952. Zoll had seen electricity used to stimulate hearts during World War II and his application of the idea was an almost immediate success. (The first patient lived 20 minutes. The second, nearly a year.)

Of course the medical community immediately recognized the importance of Zoll's discovery, put it into practice and saved millions of lives.

The End.

Oh, wait. No, they didn't. Established intelligentsia fought Zoll at every turn, denying him necessary funds to fully research the pacemaker, calling his discovery unethical, blasphemous and "a toy with little actual medical application."

Meanwhile, countless people diagnosed with heart attacks, irregular heartbeats and other heart conditions died or lived significantly diminished lives because doctors couldn't bear to accept the abundant validity of a new, different idea.

See, our readers ask us why we hate people so much.

And this is why.