The Doctor Who Was Right About Washing Hands

Ignaz Semmelweis arrived at Vienna General Hospital in 1846 and was handed a problem nobody could explain. The hospital had two maternity clinics. The First Clinic, staffed by doctors and medical students, had a maternal mortality rate from puerperal fever of around 10 percent — sometimes much higher. The Second Clinic, staffed by midwives, hovered near 4 percent. Pregnant women in Vienna were begging to be admitted to the midwives' ward. Some gave birth in the street rather than risk the doctors.

Semmelweis tested every theory the medical literature offered. Climate, overcrowding, the position women labored in — none of it tracked. Then in 1847 his friend Jakob Kolletschka cut his finger during an autopsy and died of an illness that, at autopsy, looked exactly like puerperal fever. Semmelweis put the pieces together. The doctors and students went straight from the morgue to the delivery ward. The midwives never touched cadavers.

He ordered everyone in the First Clinic to wash their hands in chlorinated lime before examining patients. Mortality dropped from 18.3 percent in April 1847 to 1.2 percent that summer.

His colleagues hated him for it. The implication — that respected physicians had been killing their patients — landed badly. Semmelweis published a book in 1861 that was scattered, defensive, and angry. He was committed to a Viennese asylum in 1865 and died there two weeks later, possibly beaten by guards, of a wound infection.

Louis Pasteur's germ theory arrived a few years after that. Joseph Lister read it, applied it to surgery, and got the credit Semmelweis had been right about for twenty years.