19th century medicine was untrustworthy at best. Doctors came at you with leaches instead of a stethoscope, and sickness flitted from person to person with devastating results. Nobody knew where it came from. The effect of bacteria wouldn’t be discovered until the 1870s. Still, doctors endeavored to save their patients with what little information they had.
One of these doctors was Ignaz Semmelweis, who worked in a Hungarian maternity clinic during 1844. At the time, most women preferred to give birth at home. Those who were forced to seek hospitalization faced staggering mortality rates. Childbed fever claimed the lives of 25-30 percent, and worse, nobody understood what caused it. Maybe it was poor ventilation? Or maybe a Death Angel was prowling the clinic. Semmelweis determined to discover the cause and, if possible, prevent it.
One of the first things he did was compare his clinic with another that had a lower mortality rate. Both were overcrowded. Both had identical ventilation. The only difference was that Semmelweis’ clinic was next door to a morgue. Doctors were constantly going back and forth between autopsies and checkups, but surely that didn’t mean anything.
Turns out, it did.
Bacteria from the cadavers was being transported from the staff to the patients. Of course, Semmelweis hadn’t a clue. Germs wouldn’t be discovered for several decades, and the idea sounded like madness. He only realized the truth after a friend died from a wound incurred during the examination of an ill woman. The similarities between the two cases led him to the conclusion that something from the morgue was spreading to the patients.
Semmelweis took immediate action. As the head of the maternity ward, he declared that the staff must wash their hands on a regular basis. To everyone’s surprise, mortality rates plummeted. In March and August of 1848, childbed fever claimed no casualties.
At first this new practice was eagerly received--but then political revolution swept over Europe. Semmelweis sided with the unpopular party and was dismissed from the hospital. Doctors stopped washing their hands as soon as he was gone, ridiculed his theories, and ignored the rising death rate.
Ousted from the clinic, Semmelweis struggled to spread the word about his discoveries. He gave lectures at Universities, wrote letters to other scientists and even published a book--but it was all in vain. The medical community was unwilling to set aside their old ideas about the spread of disease, and countless patients paid the price.
As the years went by, Semmelweis began to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. He was committed to an insane asylum and died two weeks later, having possibly been beaten by the guards. The significance of his discoveries was only realized years after his death. Younger doctors such as Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister carried on his work, successfully introducing antisepsis to the medical community.
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