noun
1. keenness
of
mental
perception
and
understanding;
discernment;
penetration.
2. Archaic. keen
vision.
1540–50;
earlier
perspicacite
<
Late
Latin
perspicācitās
sharpness
of
sight,
equivalent
to
perspicāci-
(stem
of
perspicāx
sharp-sighted;
see
perspicuous) +
-tās
-ty2
(https://www.dictionary.com/browse/perspicacity)
"One of the bacteria he cultured and squashed was Clostridium perfringens, the microbe responsible for gas gangrene, an ugly form of necrosis that takes hold in muscle tissue made vulnerable by wounds, especially the sort that lay open among injured soldiers on battlefields. When he realized this, Luehrsen complained, but Woese 'just chuckled and said not to worry' in the absence of an open wound. He had been to medical school for 'two years and two days,' Woese said, and he could assure Luehrsen that Clostridium perfringens was unlikely to give him gangrene. Luehrsen took the episode as a lesson - not a lesson to trust Woese but to rely on his own perspicacity more - and never probed the matter of why Woese had quit medical school two days into his third-year rotation in pediatrics."
- David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
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