Curing Childbed Fever

Back in 1840, an obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis worked in division one in Vienna General Hospital. One day he realised that 1 in 5 women died after delivering birth in his division from childbed fever, but in another division with only female midwives, 1 in 20 died. This statistic was appalling to him and he started to figure out many ways to prevent this pathology.

Initially, he came up with many recondite theories. He observed that in the midwives division that the woman gave birth on their sides. For the men’s division though, they had them on their backs. After testing this, it had no effect at all! Subsequently, he noted that a priest would slowly walk through the clinic and ring a bell whenever a woman that gave birth died. This propelled him to theorise that the women were appalled by the priest. Despite encouraging the priest to take a different route and ignore the bell, it had no effect on lowering the horrendous mortality rates.

Consequently, he was frustrated and gathered information from eclectic sources. During an autopsy of a woman who had died from the fever, his colleague later died from the sickness after cutting herself with the scalpel. This sparked an idea in his head and he hypothesised that there were cadaverous parasites.

Following this epiphany, Semmelweiss started to order staff to clean their hands with a chlorinated lime solution and impart his wisdom. Hence, the child death rate plummeted! How fortuitous! Semmelweiss enunciated the importance of hand washing with chlorinated lime solution. He critiqued and epitomised how poor hand washing is attributed to disease. Nonetheless, no one appreciated his theory and they scoffed it off like it was nothing. The germ theory was still enigmatic.

Following the hostility, Ignaz suffered a mental breakdown, sadly spending the rest of his years in a mental institution. Nonetheless, Semmelweiss’ hand washing technique was a catalyst in disease prevention and control.