The Doctor Who Cut Maternal Deaths Tenfold and Was Fired for It

Vienna General Hospital ran two obstetric clinics in the 1840s. The First Clinic was staffed by physicians and medical students. The Second was staffed by midwives. Childbed fever — a bacterial infection of the uterus after delivery — killed roughly three times as many mothers in the First as in the Second, year after year. Women begged to be admitted to the Second.

Ignaz Semmelweis arrived at the First Clinic as an assistant in 1846. He could not figure out the difference until March 1847, when his colleague Jakob Kolletschka cut himself during an autopsy and died of a sepsis indistinguishable from childbed fever. The connection clicked. The First Clinic's doctors did autopsies in the morning and delivered babies in the afternoon, with the same hands. The midwives did not.

In May 1847 Semmelweis required everyone entering the wards to wash their hands in chlorinated lime, which he had noticed killed the autopsy smell. The mortality rate at the First Clinic in April 1847 had been 18.3%. June was 2.2%, July 1.2%, August 1.9%. The same building, the same staff, the same patients — and a tenfold drop, sustained.

The medical establishment rejected him. Germ theory was twenty years from broad acceptance, and Semmelweis's claim that doctors were carrying the deaths from corpse to bedside was a personal accusation as much as a scientific one. He was not reappointed in Vienna and moved to Budapest. He published his book in 1861; it was poorly received. In 1865, increasingly unstable, he was committed to an asylum in Vienna and died there within two weeks, possibly from a beating. He was 47. Lister and Pasteur would prove him right within the decade.