The doctor who told colleagues to wash their hands was ridiculed.
In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that mothers died far more often on the Vienna ward run by doctors than on the one run by midwives. He made the doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime, and deaths plummeted. Much of the medical establishment rejected him anyway.
Vienna General Hospital had two maternity clinics. In the First, staffed by doctors and medical students, around one mother in ten died of puerperal, or childbed, fever. In the Second, staffed by trainee midwives, the rate averaged under 4 per cent. Women begged not to be sent to the First Clinic, and some gave birth in the street rather than be admitted. Semmelweis, an assistant there, tried ruling out causes one at a time: crowding, climate, birthing position, even the fear caused by priests giving last rites.
The breakthrough came in 1847, when his friend Jakob Kolletschka died after being nicked by a student's scalpel during an autopsy. Kolletschka's body showed the same damage as the dead mothers'. Semmelweis realised that doctors were going straight from dissecting corpses to examining women in labour, carrying what he called 'cadaverous particles' on their hands. Midwives did no autopsies. He ordered hand washing in a chlorinated lime solution. Deaths in the First Clinic, 18.3 per cent in April 1847, fell to around 1 to 2 per cent that summer.
His idea clashed with the medicine of the day, which often explained disease as a personal imbalance of the body's humours. He had no mechanism to offer, because germ theory was not yet accepted, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that a gentleman's hands could be unclean. He was slow to publish, and later wrote furious open letters calling his critics murderers. He lost his Vienna post in 1849; in Budapest he almost eliminated childbed fever on his wards, with little recognition.
In 1865 he was committed to an asylum, where guards beat him, and he died two weeks later from an infected wound. Only when Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister and Robert Koch developed germ theory over the following decades did his results make sense. His name survives in the 'Semmelweis reflex': the habit of rejecting new evidence because it contradicts what everyone already believes.
Source: Wikipedia — Ignaz Semmelweis · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
