Reminds me of something I read in— I think— Hubert Mania’s book Kettenreaktion (Chain Reaction; it seems there’s no English language version). In it, he talks besides other things about how the newly discovered radioactivity was believed to be good for everything, including things like burning...1/2

...burning the evil out of convicts. I always understood this as a warning about how even scientists can become blind believers without any real data proving their assumptions. 2/2