Ignaz Semmelweis was the first doctor to discover the importance for medical professionals of hand washing. In the 19th century, it was common for women to die from an illness contracted during or after childbirth, known as childbed fever. While working at an obstetric department in Vienna, Austria, Semmelweis noticed that women delivered by physicians and medical students had a much higher mortality rate than women delivered by midwives. He concluded that the problem was that physicians were handling corpses during autopsies before attending to pregnant women, and determined that hand washing would prevent them from passing on illness.
After Semmelweis initiated a mandatory hand-washing policy, the mortality rate for women delivered by doctors fell from 18 per cent to 2 per cent – the same as it was for midwives. When he began washing medical instruments, it fell to just 1 per cent.
Nevertheless, the senior staff at the hospital still did not accept that doctors were causing the women’s disease. They believed that infections were spread through the air by something called miasmas, and attributed the low death rate to a new ventilation system. Semmelweis got another job as head of obstetrics in Budapest, Hungary, where he again succeeded at reducing mortality by insisting that doctors wash their hands.
In 1861, he published a book on his findings about how to prevent childbed fever, but it was poorly received. He died in a public insane asylum five years later, at the age of 47.
Semmelweis must take some of the blame for his failure to win over his colleagues. Accounts describe him as arrogant and angry, with a tendency to insult and humiliate his opponents.
His work was only widely appreciated two decades later, after research by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and Joseph Lister produced more evidence for germ theory and antiseptic techniques.
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