Ignaz Semmelweis was born in Budapest in 1818. He received his doctor’s degree from Vienna in 1844 and was appointed assistant at the obstetric clinic in Vienna and devoted his life to the health of babies and mothers. His is a name you have probably never heard of. He has probably saved more lives than any other person in the medical profession.
Rich women delivered at home. But poverty, illegitimacy, or obstetrical complications forced many woman to seek hospitalization. The mortality rates ranged as high as 25–30 percent. Various ideas were floated to explain the high death rates. Some thought that the infection was induced by overcrowding, poor ventilation, the onset of lactation, or miasma. Semmelweis too proceeded to investigate its cause although his chief objected because he thought that the deaths could not be prevented.
Semmelweis started observing hospital routines. He noted that pregnant women were admitted to one of two obstetric wards. The only difference between the two wards was that one was staffed exclusively by midwives, while in the other ward, medical students and doctors were in charge of deliveries and conducted autopsies on dead women in the nearby room. He observed that mortality was much higher in the latter ward.
The death of a friend and colleague of Semmelweis provided him a clue to solve this puzzle. The friend developed a condition resembling the fever in the obstetrics ward staffed by doctors following a scalpel laceration while supervising an autopsy. This made him suspect that the higher mortality rate in the ward was due to the contamination of the hands of medical students and doctors with something during autopsies. He began to suspect that doctors were bringing the infection to the patients.
The idea that many diseases are caused by germs is only about 150 years old. In Sommelweis' time, doctors often went directly from dissecting corpses in the morgue to examining mothers in the maternity ward. He suggested as an experiment that the doctors wash their hands before touching the mothers not just with soap but with a chlorine solution. Chlorine, as we know today, is about the best disinfectant there is. Semmelweis didn't know anything about germs. He chose chlorine because he thought it would be the best way to get rid of any smell left behind by those little bits of corpse on the doctors' hands.
And when he imposed this, the rate of childbed fever fell dramatically. You'd think everyone would be thrilled. Semmelweis had solved the problem! But they weren't thrilled. For one thing, doctors were upset because Semmelweis' hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women. How dare he make such a suggestion to his social superiors? He was a nobody who kept on asking his colleagues to wash their hands. And Semmelweis was not very tactful. He publicly berated people who disagreed with him and made some influential enemies. Eventually the doctors in his clinic refused to listen to him and gave up the chlorine hand-washing. He lost his job.
Semmelweis kept trying to convince doctors in other parts of Europe to wash with chlorine, but no one would listen to him. At the time, it was argued that diseases resulted from imbalances among four humors, and that each disease was unique because each person was unique. Doctors said that a healthy person had a perfect balance of the four humors of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Semmelweis's findings that disease resulted from unhygienic practices contrasted with the theory of humors. Historians have argued that Semmelweis's Jewish and Hungarian origins contributed to the dismissal.
Without a job, Semmelweis left Vienna and returned to Pest, Hungary. There, he continued to implement his hand washing procedures. In 1851, He became the head physician at the Szent Rókus Hospital in Pest. When he implemented his policies, the rate of childhood fever plummeted. In 1855, Semmelweis became head of obstetrics at the University of Pest. When he implemented the chlorine washing procedure, infection rates at the university hospital fell. Throughout the 1850s, Semmelweis wrote papers on childhood fever and, in 1861, he published his book on the subject.
Semmelweis's mental health began to deteriorate after the publication of his book and he suffered from severe depression. By 1865, his abnormal public behavior started affecting his professional life and his wife and some of his colleagues committed him to an insane asylum in Vienna, Austria. After trying to leave the insane asylum in August 1865, he was beaten and put in a straitjacket. After two weeks in the asylum, Semmelweis died on 13 August 1865 in Vienna, Austria. His autopsy revealed that he had died from blood poisoning in a wound that could have been sustained during the beating.
Semmelweis’s doctrine was subsequently accepted by medical science. Semmelweis was a pioneer in scientific risk assessment and in identifying the source of transmission, including conducting an effective intervention. Subsequently, it might be said that he has saved millions of lives, including, quite possibly, yours and mine.
