Semmelweis was smart enough to listen to his patients. (The hospital ward run by midwives, without autopsy duties, had far better outcomes with their deliveries).Įvery day he heard the heart-rending pleas of women assigned to his care begging to be discharged because they believed these doctors to be the harbingers of death. Nevertheless, his claim to immortality was the result of an obsession with finding the means to end the childbed fever epidemics that were killing nearly a third of his patients. Medicine and surgery were considered to be the premier specialties in Vienna but because of his background and religion Semmelweis was relegated to running the less desirable division of obstetrics. Semmelweis was brilliant but had two strikes against him when applying for a position at the Vienna General Hospital in 1846: he was Hungarian and Jewish. They then proceeded to the wards to examine the laboring women about to deliver their babies.ĭr. Medical students and their professors at the elite teaching hospitals of this era typically began their day performing barehanded autopsies on the women who had died the day before of childbed fever. The reason seems readily apparent today, if not back then. And a miserable end it was: raging fevers, putrid pus emanating from the birth canal, painful abscesses in the abdomen and chest, and an irreversible descent into an absolute hell of sepsis and death - all within 24 hours of the baby’s birth. The cause was, invariably, childbed fever. Yet when doctors working in the best maternity hospitals in Europe and America performed deliveries, the maternal death rate was often 10 to 20 times greater. In the mid-19th century, about five women in 1,000 died in deliveries performed by midwives or at home. ![]() ![]() His plea was far more than aesthetic it was a matter of life and death and helped to prevent a deadly malady known as “childbed” or puerperal (from the Latin words for child and parent) fever. Semmelweis began exhorting his fellow physicians at the famed Vienna General Hospital (Allgemeines Krankenhaus) to wash up before examining women about to deliver babies. Surprisingly, physicians did not begin to acknowledge the lifesaving power of this simple act until 1847 ![]() What, exactly, was the doctor’s advice to his colleagues on that long ago night? It could be summed up in three little words: wash your hands!Īt this late date, we all expect our doctors to wash their hands before examining us or performing an operation in order to prevent the spread of infection.
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