He Saved The Lives Of Women In The Mid-19th Century By Getting People To Wash Their Hands, And Then He Was Committed To An Asylum
In the mid-19th century, a Hungarian physician named Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis made an important, life-saving discovery.
He figured out that handwashing—a concept that we still put into practice each and every day—could drastically reduce the spread of puerperal fever, a common and deadly disease that affected women who had recently given birth.
Although he presented clear and compelling evidence, his findings were met with harsh resistance from the medical community at the time.
Ultimately, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died. Tragically, his work was not accepted until after his death, laying the foundation for modern antiseptic procedures.
During the mid-19th century, about five in 1,000 women died in at-home births or deliveries performed by midwives.
However, the maternal death rate in the best maternity hospitals in Europe and America was often 10 to 20 times higher. The cause of all these deaths was puerperal fever, also known as childbed fever.
The disease was devastating and progressed rapidly, producing raging fevers, lower abdominal pain, and bad-smelling pus from the birth canal. This all happened within 24 hours of the baby’s birth.
Back then, medical students and doctors at these hospitals started their days performing autopsies on women who had recently died from childbed fever. Of course, these examinations were done without wearing gloves. Afterward, they headed over to the maternity wards to assist women in labor.
At the Vienna General Hospital, Dr. Semmelweis ran the less desirable division of obstetrics in 1846. He was put into the position due to his background and religion. Childbed fever was killing almost a third of his patients, and he vowed to get down to the bottom of this medical mystery.
kvdkz – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
Dr. Semmelweis made the connection that puerperal fever was caused by doctors handling dissected corpses during autopsies and transferring some kind of poison from the bodies to women in the delivery room. Nowadays, we know that poison is a bacteria called Group A hemolytic streptococcus.
He wasn’t the first physician to come to this conclusion, but he was the first to instruct his medical students in 1847 to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution until the smell of dead bodies was gone.
Soon enough, the maternal mortality rates saw a huge decrease.
Despite the obvious success of handwashing, many of his colleagues rejected his ideas. They were outraged by the suggestion that they had been the ones causing their patients’ deaths.
With each criticism hurled his way, Semmelweis became increasingly angry. He yelled at some of the most powerful doctors at the hospital and spat insults in their faces. Such behavior was not tolerated in a professional setting, and he lost his job.
In 1850, he left for his native home of Budapest without telling anyone. He was an incredibly stubborn man and did not publish his work until 1861.
Semmelweis grew more unstable and was finally committed to an insane asylum in July 1865. Two weeks later, he died at the age of 47.
There has been speculation that his mental breakdown was brought on by an experiment in which he infected himself with syphilis, or he had developed an early variant of Alzheimer’s.
He was likely beaten in the asylum and eventually died of sepsis, an infection in the bloodstream, which was essentially the same disease he fought so hard to prevent in women with childbed fever.
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