In 1877, a young Austrian student spent the better part of a year cutting open hundreds of eels and dissecting them. The Goal ? To figure out where this creature comes from, how it reproduces. Because science at the time had no answer to this ancient question. [1]
We now know that when eels have
not yet reached the ocean, they entirely lack reproductive organs. As it turns
out, they only grow them once they are in the ocean and about to reproduce. The
young student, frustrated by his lack of success and unable to solve the
mystery, gave up on his slippery and pointless task. So angered he was by this colossal
waste of time, that he went an entirely different direction…
The student’s name? Sigmund
Freud. Father of psychoanalysis and one of the most famous neurologists of all
time. Sometimes it’s okay to give up — you may never be known as “the man who
figured out how eels bang” but you might just become a legendary
psychiatrist, instead.
Footnotes [1] Eel life history - Wikipedia
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