Hand Washing History

Ignaz Semmelweis: The Doctor Who Discovered Hand-Washing Saves Patients' Lives

opera.com

Nov 7, 2019 4:09 PM

By Ayomide Akinbode

Despite his discovery that washing of hands by doctors could save a patient’s life, Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweiss still ended his life in a mental institution and was beaten to death.

The year was 1847 and the mortality rate among pregnant women in the hospital where Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis worked in Vienna, Austria, was very high. He was the head of the maternity ward at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus — the largest hospital in Vienna, Austria.

An infection of the female reproductive organs following childbirth, the puerperal fever (also known as “childbed fever”) was a common cause of death and was almost seen as incurable by the medical practitioners at the time.

In Semmelweis’ hospital, one in six women died after childbirth of the fever. The symptoms were no different. After giving birth, the new mother would develop chills and then a fever after some hours. Subsequently, her abdomen would become swollen and excruciatingly painful. Within a few days, she would be dead, leaving a motherless child to the world.

This incident was so common in the hospitals in Vienna that Semmelweis decided to make some findings on the cause of the high mortality rates.

In his research, the doctor discovered that pregnant women in a medical student-run clinic had a much mortality rate from the puerperal fever, in fact, three times higher than clinics run by midwives.

Furthering his research, Semmelweis also discovered that the students carried “something” from the mortuary after conducting autopsies on dead bodies to the pregnant women they later examined.

Some of the autopsies were also carried out on the women. The doctors and their medical students as well knew that when they opened the bodies, they would be met with a strong stench that made the new students vomit immediately.

Afterward, they would observe the swollen and inflamed ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, as well as pools of puss all over the abdominal cavity. In plain words, the insides of the women had been ravaged.

Semmelweis then ordered and forced all of the doctors and students under him to wash their hands with the chlorinated lime solution before entering the maternity ward. True to his words, the mortality rate fell drastically from 18% to 1%.

He didn’t know the reason for the success because of the idea that germs existed and caused infections was non-existent at the time. In fact, the germ theory would remain in obscurity for 18 years until Louis Pasteur, a French biologist, microbiologist, and chemist, popularised it with his pasteurization method in 1865.

However, despite Semmelweis’ compelling practical evidence, the doctors of the medical community in Vienna condemned and disregarded his theory. They stubbornly refused to entertain the idea, arguing that they could be hurting their patients. As a result, the Hungarian lost the respect of his colleagues and superiors alike and the whole scenario ruined his career which never recovered.

Ignaz Semmelweis struggled for years to promote his ground-breaking contribution to the field of medical hygiene through his hand-disinfection policies but was admitted to an asylum for mentally deranged people in 1865, where he was later beaten and died 14 days later. He was 47.

Although many monuments and landmarks, even a university is named after Semmelweis for his work on the theory of germs, he never lived to see his life’s work came to fruition.