Published in the Roswell Daily Record, July 2006
In Honor of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, “The Savior of Mothers”
The man known for his discovery of the cause of childbed fever was born in Hungary on July 1, 1818. Ignaz Semmelweis received his MD degree from the Vienna Medical University and was appointed assistant at the obstetric clinic in Vienna in 1844. The clinic’s patients were all poor women. Rich women could afford to have the doctor come to them, and had their babies at home.
The clinic was divided into two wards-- one staffed by medical students and one where midwives delivered the babies. Deaths due to “childbed,” or puerperal, fever ranged as high as 25 to 30 percent in the ward where the medical students worked, but less than half that in the ward attended by midwives.
Over the strong objections of his conservative superior, Semmelweis investigated the conditions in the two wards. He found only one obvious difference between them-- the medical students often came directly from the autopsy room, where they had been cutting open the diseased corpses. They delivered babies while still wearing bloody aprons and with unwashed hands.
When Semmelweis ordered the medical students to wash their hands in chlorinated water before each delivery, the average death rate in that ward dropped from 18.3 percent to 1.3 percent. Semmelweis had invented an entirely new procedure, which now goes under the general name of antiseptic prophylaxis (keeping clean to protect against infection).
The younger doctors in Vienna were very excited about his new procedure, but his superior continued to oppose him. In 1849 he was dropped from his post at the Vienna clinic.
Semmelweis returned to Hungary and worked in the St. Rochus Hospital, where he was put in charge of the obstetrics department. During his years there the death rate for poor mothers averaged less than one percent.
In 1855 he was appointed Professor of Obstetrics at the University of Pest (later Budapest), married, and had five children. His ideas were accepted in Hungary, and the Hungarian government ordered all district authorities to start using his methods. But in other European countries the general sentiment was to ‘stop the nonsense about the chlorine hand wash.’
The years of controversy gradually undermined his spirit. It must have been agonizing for him to read reports of thousands of women dying every year, and to know that their lives could have been saved if doctors would just wash their hands before delivering babies. He had a nervous breakdown and died in a mental institution on August 13, 1865. Ironically, his death was caused by an infected cut on his hand. He died of puerperal fever, the same disease from which he had protected so many poor women.
In that same year Joseph Lister first introduced antiseptic surgical techniques. In 1867 Louis Pasteur began his experiments that eventually showed that diseases were not caused by ‘spontaneous generation,’ which led to the discovery of bacteria (and then viruses). Lister’s work was not fully accepted until 1877. In 1881 Pasteur developed the first vaccines, and began vaccinating people against anthrax and cholera.
Both of these better-known scientists owe a great deal to Semmelweis. He saw a serious problem where others saw only a normal death rate, and he found a simple, practical solution without bothering about the theory.