The doctor who was ridiculed for suggesting handwashing
In 1847, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that childbed fever deaths plummeted when doctors washed their hands in a chlorine solution before delivering babies. Despite his overwhelming evidence, the medical community rejected his ideas because germ theory had not yet been established. He died in an asylum before his work was vindicated.
Two Wards and a Mystery in Vienna
In the mid-1840s, the Vienna General Hospital operated two separate maternity clinics as part of its free lying-in service for expectant mothers. The First Obstetrical Clinic was dedicated to training medical students and physicians, while the Second Obstetrical Clinic trained only student midwives. Despite identical physical environments and similar patient demographics, the two clinics experienced vastly different outcomes. Women admitted to the First Clinic were dying of puerperal fever—often called childbed fever—at catastrophic rates, frequently several times higher than the mortality rate in the Second Clinic.
Puerperal fever was a devastating postpartum infection that swept through hospital maternity wards across Europe. Women who fell ill suffered from high fevers, intense abdominal pain, and rapid systemic decline, usually dying within days of giving birth. The disparity between Vienna's two clinics was an open secret in the city. Expectant mothers begged in tears to be admitted to the Second Clinic rather than the First, and some chose to give birth in the surrounding streets instead of risking admission to the physicians' ward. Curiously, women who delivered in the streets and were only later admitted to the hospital consistently showed far lower rates of infection than those delivered by doctors inside the First Clinic.
Ignaz Semmelweis, a young Hungarian physician appointed as an assistant in the First Clinic in 1846, became consumed by this discrepancy. He systematically tested and eliminated existing hypotheses. He examined differences in climate, ventilation, overcrowding, religious practices, and even the psychological impact of the priest walking through the ward to administer the last rites. None of these variables could explain why the patients under the care of doctors were dying at such an alarming rate while the patients attended by midwives were largely surviving.