Semmelweis Cut Maternal Mortality 90% With Chlorinated Lime — and Was Beaten to Death in an Asylum

When Ignaz Semmelweis arrived at the Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic in 1846, the maternal mortality rate from puerperal fever ("childbed fever") was averaging around 10 percent and could spike higher. The hospital ran two maternity clinics whose admissions alternated by day. The First Clinic was run by physicians and medical students; the Second Clinic was run by midwives. Their mortality rates differed in a way nobody could explain — the First averaged about 10 percent, the Second well under 4 percent. The First's reputation was so bad that women in labor who couldn't avoid the hospital sometimes gave birth in the streets outside rather than be admitted to the wrong rotation.

In March 1847 a colleague of Semmelweis, the pathologist Jakob Kolletschka, died of an infection he had caught from a scalpel cut during an autopsy. The autopsy report on Kolletschka described tissue findings indistinguishable from those of women dying of puerperal fever. Semmelweis suddenly understood. The First Clinic's physicians and students, but not the Second's midwives, came to the maternity ward straight from autopsies, with their hands carrying what he called "cadaverous particles." In May 1847 he ordered everyone entering his clinic to wash their hands in a chlorinated-lime solution. The First Clinic's mortality dropped from 18.3% in April to 1.2% in July.

The medical establishment of his time hated this. Germ theory was still years away. Pasteur and Koch had not yet published. Doctors received the suggestion that they were the agent of patients' deaths as a personal accusation. Semmelweis was eased out of the Vienna position in 1850, became increasingly erratic over the next decade, and was committed to an asylum in 1865, possibly under a fabricated pretext. He was beaten by guards within hours of arrival and died fourteen days later from a gangrenous wound consistent with the beating.