In 1846, Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor working as the assistant of the obstetric clinic in Vienna’s General Hospital, investigated why women giving birth in a hospital maternity ward staffed by all male doctors and medical students had a 5 times higher death rate due to “childbed fever” than women who gave birth in a hospital staffed by female midwives. [1]
Following the death of a male friend, punctured by a scalpel and dying of the same “childbed fever”, in 1847 Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions between going from conducting autopsy’s to then delivering babies! Under his measures the mortality rate averaged only 0.85% compared to 10-15% under ‘normal’ practice. [2, 3]
Semmelweis’s observations conflicted and were rejected by the established medical authority. Though the Hungarian government adopted his “prophylactic practice” in 1855. By 1861 his mental health declined into depression, leading to his committment to an asylum in 1865, where he was beaten, became infected and died 2 weeks later on August 13, 1865 likely of sepsis. [3]
The founding of “antiseptic medicine” was credited to surgeon Sir Joseph Lister, not Semmelweis! “In 1864, while working at Glasgow University as Professor of Surgery, Lister was introduced to Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, and decided to apply it to the problem of surgical infections.” [4]