Ignác Semmelweis

Who is Ignác Semmelweis?

Ignác Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician and obstetrician known for discovering that hand-washing with a chlorinated lime solution could dramatically reduce the incidence of puerperal (childbed) fever in maternity clinics. Working at the Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s, he noticed that mortality rates were far higher in the ward staffed by medical students, who often came directly from autopsies, than in the ward staffed by midwives. He hypothesized that "cadaverous particles" carried on the hands of doctors were transmitting disease, and instituted mandatory hand disinfection, which cut mortality rates sharply. Despite this striking evidence, his ideas were rejected by much of the contemporary medical establishment, which had not yet accepted germ theory, and Semmelweis faced professional isolation and ridicule. He suffered a severe decline in mental health later in life and died in 1865 in an asylum, from an infected wound, in circumstances that are still debated by historians. Decades after his death, the germ theory of disease developed by Louis Pasteur and others vindicated his findings, and he is now honored as a pioneer of antiseptic procedures and infection control, sometimes called the "savior of mothers."

Sources: Semmelweis Museum, Library and Archives of the History of Medicine, Budapest · K. Codell Carter and Barbara R. Carter, Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Ignaz Semmelweis"