In the year 1846, a young Hungarian man named Ignaz Semmelweis, who we will just call Iggy because I’ll be damned if I type out Ignaz Semmelweis more than I have to, was appointed to a prestigious position at the best hospital in Vienna, overseeing the maternity wards. Now at the time, the hospital had two maternity wards, one which trained doctors and one which trained midwives, which were mostly utilized by underprivileged women and prostitutes who could not afford to have doctors visit their homes. Such maternity wards were common across Europe at the time, often funded by churches to help combat uncomfortably high levels of infanticide of illegitimate children. The system worked rather well, with the women getting much better levels of medical care and free childcare, and the doctors and midwives getting live subjects to practice on, which was all well and good since otherwise all they had to train with was cadavers.
Anyways, being a curious fellow, soon after taking his position, Iggy noticed a rather strange phenomenon regarding his patients. The maternity ward training doctors and the one training midwives admitted patients on alternating days, and women would literally fall on their knees begging to be allowed into the midwife ward if they showed up on the wrong day. Some would even give birth out on the street to avoid the doctor run ward. While many of his contemporaries wrote such behaviors off as poor people just being stupid superstitious little shits, Iggy avoided making assumptions and instead started checking the numbers. What he discovered was that the doctor’s ward had more than double the rate of deaths due to puerperal fever, a charming condition where within ten days of giving birth women developed unexplainable fevers and died. In fact, 10% of the women who came into the doctor’s ward died soon after giving birth.
Now at the time, puerperal fever was not some new condition, in fact it had been noted in medical texts for the past 2,000 years. Furthermore, doctors at the time did understand that it was more common in urban areas than rural ones, though this was mostly chalked up to cities being rather filthy places devoid of fresh air. However, Iggy could see no reason why two different wards in the same hospital should have such alarmingly different rates. Not being one to just sit on his ass, he began working to eliminate differences between the two wards; taking into account everything from temperature to overcrowding to even religious practices, but could find no reason for the disparate death rate. Luckily, in 1847, Iggy had a breakthrough when his mentor was accidentally stabbed by a scalpel during a post mortem. His mentor soon after died with symptoms perfectly matching those of puerperal fever. It was then that the answer hit Iggy like a shit ton of bricks, the difference between the doctors and midwives was that the doctors spent half their days with the arms shoved in cadavers.
Now it’s probably worth mentioning at this point that though people were aware of germs at the time, they’d seen them in microscopes, but it still wasn’t understood that they had any connection with disease. They were mostly seen as harmless tiny animals, like extremely miniature chickens or something. So though Iggy didn’t make the connection to these tiny animals, he at least understood that some kind of particle was getting from the cadavers to the women giving birth, and that the doctors were the carriers. To combat this, he began experimenting with cleaning his hands, testing various diluted caustic chemicals to see if they literally removed the cadaver stink from his fingers. He then made hand washing a requirement for doctors before seeing patients, and lo and behold, the puerperal deaths dropped by 90 percent.
Now to be fair, Iggy certainly wasn’t the first person to come up with this idea. A surgeon in the British navy was the first to bring up the idea of doctors spreading disease in 1795, and a British and American doctor had both figured out and began promoting the cleaning of hands in 1842 and 1843 respectively. However, Iggy was the first to really show the connection in data. He also quickly became the loudest proponent of widely adopting the practice. Unfortunately, it did not go well. Doctors, most of whom saw themselves as upper crust gentleman, were insulted by the very idea that they were somehow filthy and spreading disease to their patients. They challenged Iggy on his hypothesis, to which he responded by writing heated letters declaring anyone who didn’t follow his advice was an unethical murderer. Surprisingly, this did little to convince his critics, and growing increasingly unpopular, he eventually lost his prestigious position and was forced to find work at a small hospital out in the sticks.
Over the next twenty years Iggy became increasingly depressed. Once described as a jovial man, he became a boor who wanted to talk about nothing but his theories and how his critics were idiots. Attempts to publish his further research was only met with ridicule. Eventually he became a drunk who spent most of his time in the company of prostitutes. Increasingly violent and suffering from dementia, his family had him committed to an asylum, where he died in 1865 from an infection contracted after a severe beating by several guards. He was 47 years old. The following year, Louis Pasteur published his findings connecting germs to disease. In the next several years it became common for doctors to wash their hands, eventually leading to large scale campaigns to improve hygiene amongst the general public at the turn of the 20th century.
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ignaz_Semmelweis_1860.jpg