The Doctor Who Was Beaten for Telling Surgeons to Wash

Jakob Kolletschka, a forensic anatomist at Vienna General Hospital, nicked his finger during a student's autopsy in March 1847 and died of sepsis a few weeks later. His autopsy looked, to his colleague Ignaz Semmelweis, exactly like the puerperal fever killing women in the maternity ward upstairs.

That ward had a problem nobody could explain. The First Obstetrical Clinic was staffed by physicians and medical students; the Second was staffed by midwives. From 1841 to 1846 the First Clinic's maternal mortality averaged about 10 percent, with annual rates reaching 18 percent. The midwives' ward sat near 4 percent. Pregnant women in Vienna begged not to be admitted to the First.

Kolletschka's death was the hinge. The doctors and students were going from morning autopsies straight to pelvic exams. The midwives never touched cadavers. Semmelweis ordered everyone entering the maternity ward to scrub their hands in a chlorinated lime solution -- the chlorine was strong enough to kill the autopsy smell, and he reasoned that whatever carried the smell carried the disease.

In April 1847 the First Clinic's mortality stood at 18.3 percent. By June it was 2.2 percent. By August, 1.2 percent. The same doctors, the same patients, the same building -- a bowl of chlorinated lime by the door.

The medical establishment did not thank him. Germ theory was still two decades away, and Semmelweis was telling distinguished physicians that they were the cause of death. He was passed over for promotion, lost his Vienna post in 1849, and spent the next sixteen years writing increasingly furious open letters calling his critics murderers. In 1865 his colleagues lured him to an asylum, where guards beat him. He died there fourteen days later, age 47, of a gangrenous wound on his hand.