Semmelweis
Can washing your hands save a life?
That time, that place
The maternity clinic of the Vienna General Hospital had two wards: one staffed by doctors and medical students, the other by midwives.
Maternal mortality ran near ten percent in the doctors' ward and four in the midwives'. The women knew. They begged on their knees to be sent to the midwives.
Why this question
Semmelweis eliminated the differences one at a time: birthing position, weather, crowding, even the priest passing through with a bell. All the same, or changed without effect.
The difference left was the people. Doctors and students dissected corpses in the morning and came straight to the delivery room without washing.
What was found
Confirmation came from a death. His colleague Kolletschka was cut by a student's blade during a dissection and died days later — of symptoms identical to the childbed fever killing the mothers.
Something is carried from the corpse. Invisible, unnamable, and carried.
He required hands washed in chlorinated water. Mortality fell from ten percent to around one.
He did not know about bacteria. But the numbers were unambiguous.
Childbed fever came from bad air or the mother's constitution
Mortality falling from ten percent to about one after handwashing was required
It was not accepted. Doctors were insulted by the claim that their own hands were killing women. He was pushed out, committed to an asylum, and died at forty-seven. Twenty years later Pasteur and Lister proved him right