The godfather of clean hands: The story of Ignaz Semmelweis
Reading time: 3 minutes
During the 1800s, the scourge of childbed fever ravaged maternity hospitals throughout Europe, often killing 20-30% of new mothers.
The cause, however, remained elusive.
In 1847, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis, working in a hospital in Vienna, investigated the matter. He unearthed a curious trend.
Women who gave birth in the clinic overseen by midwives had a much lower mortality rate than those in the clinic attended by physicians. The difference? Physicians often went directly from dissecting corpses in the morning to delivering babies in the afternoon.
Semmelweis further found that if the doctors washed their hands with chlorinated lime before attending childbirth, the disease close to disappeared. He had no scientific explanation for this solution, as the concept of germs had not yet been discovered. But he was adamant that the doctors were transmitting something that made these women sick. Semmelweis sounded the alarm bells and shared this discovery with the medical community.
Expecting to be toasted, he got roasted.
His observations conflicted with the time's entrenched scientific and medical opinions, and he was marginalised and ridiculed. His fancy fellow physicians were offended by the notion that they were the agents of disease transmission.
The backlash took a toll on Semmelweis. He was dismissed from his job, and his mental health deteriorated so severely that he ended up in an asylum. There he died only two weeks into detention after taking a brutal beating from a group of guards. Ironically, he died of infection caused by his injuries. The poor guy just wanted people to wash their hands.
In the years following Semmelweis's death, Louis Pasteur's work on germ theory provided the scientific explanation that was previously missing. Over time the medical community began to recognise the importance of sterilisation, and Semmelweis's once-ridiculed protocols became foundational in medical hygiene.
Throughout history, numerous innovations and findings were initially rejected or mocked, only to be accepted and embraced later on. Galileo Galilei’s notion that the earth revolves around the sun was spurned by the Catholic Church, which sentenced him to life imprisonment. He served his sentence under house arrest, where he died a decade later. In 1912, Alfred Wegener proposed that continents were once joined together then drifted apart. He, too, faced scepticism and derision from many in the geological community. The theory of plate tectonics was only accepted in the 1960s - fifty years later.
These are cautionary tales about the perils of closed-mindedness in the face of bold new ideas. We instinctively reject new knowledge that contradicts established norms or beliefs. We don’t want our thinking changed and select media sources and browse the internet to confirm our existing opinions.
Sometimes, it’s worth listening to the oddballs and hand-washers of the world. They may just be onto something.
