Almost two hundred years ago, there was a doctor in Hungary who could have been a hero. His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, and he was presented with a peculiar puzzle. Ignaz had just started his new job at a maternity clinic at the General Hospital in Vienna. But the hospital had a big problem. Many women in the wards were dying from what was called “Childbed Fever.” Obsessed with collecting data, Ignaz began studying two separate clinics within the same hospital. The first was staffed by all-male doctors and students, while the other was all-female midwives. His research showed that women giving birth in the doctors’ ward were five times more likely to die than the ones under the care of the midwives. But why?
Continuing his observations, he noticed two significant differences. The first was that the doctors had the women give birth on their backs while the midwives had them lay on their side. He instructed the doctors to follow the model of the midwives. But nothing changed. Next, he saw that in the doctors’ ward, whenever a woman died of the fever, a priest would walk through the clinic ringing a bell. He was convinced that this must be affecting the increased deaths, so he ordered the priest to stop. But, still, the death rate continued.
Frustrated, Ignaz takes a break from his work to try and clear his head. When he comes back to the hospital, he discovers that one of his colleagues had died. Apparently, this was a common occurrence for doctors at the time. He had pricked his finger while performing an autopsy on a woman who died from the fever, and then he too got sick. Although tragic, most of the hospital staff simply accepted it as usual–but not Ignaz.
He realized that the doctor had contracted the fever from the dead woman’s body. It wasn’t a “childbed” fever, but something that anyone in the hospital was susceptible to catch. If this was true, then Ignaz had solved the puzzle of why so many women were getting sick in the doctor’s ward. His theory was that small particles from the autopsy table were being carried on the doctor’s hands back into the clinic and infecting the women. Less deaths occurred under the midwives because they weren’t performing autopsies. All he had to do was figure out a way to get rid of those particles. He developed a solution made of lime and chlorine and began having the doctors wash their hands and instruments. This cut down the rate of death from childbed fever dramatically.
Now, this may sound like a beautiful ending, and it was a huge step forward for medical science–but not for Ignaz. The doctors didn’t like his answer to the problem. In fact, they refused to continue following his instructions to wash their hands. They had but one simple reason, it made them look like the bad guys. If Ignaz was right, then it meant that the doctors were the cause for the deaths of so many women. Ignaz was confused. Why wouldn’t they just wash their hands? In an attempt to silence his discovery, Ignaz was fired. But he didn’t give up. He traveled all over Europe to tell others what he had found, but no one would listen to him. Ignaz got angry. He couldn’t understand why his colleagues wouldn’t accept responsibility for washing their hands. After 20 years of trying to change the world, but with no progress, Ignaz went insane–literally. At the age of 47, the doctor was committed to a mental asylum. Ignaz Semmelweis had figured out a way to keep the disease off of people’s hands, but he couldn’t create a cure for the pride that had poisoned people’s hearts.
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