It's mid-1800s and a group of doctors surround a table which has splayed on it an opened
cadaver.
An audience of men of science watch in awe as those doctors remove organs from the body
and try to explain the cause of death.
This is a new age, a new era, but while some of those men are legends in their own right,
they’re still pretty ignorant.
Here’s why.
After the discectomy a man rushes in and tells those doctors that they should wash their
hands before returning to their hospitals.
It could save lives, he says.
“This is preposterous!” barks one doctor, “Why in God’s name would one wash their
hands…get out of here you deluded imbecile.”
Welcome to the sad, wonderful and wacky world of how hand-washing got started.
You see, at the time, those doctors were in fact about to change the world.
They were champions in an era which could be called the medical enlightenment.
This was the time that surgeons were understanding the human body much better than ever before,
when illness and disease was no longer being blamed on a person having a “demonic sensibility”.
Opening up bodies was nothing new.
In fact, in the 17th century the Company of Surgeons in London would often dissect convicted
murders in public…after they’d been hanged of course.
London wasn’t quite Westeros, although body-snatching was all the rage because those doctors and
surgeons needed more training.
These surgeons were like Kings at around the time of the 1850s.
Dissection was nothing new, but in London and all over Europe medical men were not just
seeing how the body worked, but they were now heading into the world of “pathological
anatomy”, meaning dissecting as a way of finding the cause of death.
So now imagine that one day some of the leading surgeons in the world are doing their thing
and in walks a man that tells them to wash their hands.
They think this guy is tripping, to use today’s parlance, and laugh him out of the hospital.
This guy wasn’t tripping at all, and in fact, we can thank him for changing the world.
We can thank him for saving countless lives, and that’s why he is sometimes called “The
Savior of Mothers.”
It was the doctors who were ignorant and deluded.
We also bet that most of you guys have never even heard of this hero, how he changed the
world, but how he died so savagely.
We guarantee you, this is one of the best stories you've never heard.
The man we are talking about was one Ignaz Semmelweis and he was born on 1 July 1818
in what is now today’s Budapest, the capital city of Hungary.
He got himself a medical degree and then focused on a branch of medicine called obstetrics.
If you don’t know what that is, it’s concerned with childbirth.
Ah ok, so this guy wasn’t one of those heroic surgeons, you are thinking.
The answer is no.
Semmelweis actually went to work as an assistant professor at The First Obstetrical Clinic
of the Vienna General Hospital.
This was the year 1846, and the city of Vienna was a center of science and art.
At the time a lot of poor women or prostitutes were getting pregnant and then killing the
baby.
This is known as infanticide, and was quite common back then.
This clinic where our good doctor worked would actually take in pregnant women and even help
bring up the child.
This was the deal.
The hospital said, hey, come have your child here.
Our new doctors and nurses can learn a thing or two, and you get free childcare.
You have to also remember that a lot of women died during childbirth back then.
Those doctors and midwives really needed that training.
But Semmelweis soon started noticing something really weird.
There was a First and Second Clinic at the hospital, and Semmelweis saw that way more
women died after giving birth at the First Clinic.
In fact, everyone knew this…the women would beg to be sent to the Second Clinic.
Some of them even gave birth outside the hospital and then pretended that they’d accidentally
had the child on the way to the hospital.
That way they could still get free childcare.
Other women actually got on their knees and pleaded with the doctors not to send them
to that deadly first clinic.
The place was a veritable death trap, and Semmelweis and the women knew this only too
well.
You see, those women who died after giving birth were dying of something called puerperal
fever, aka childbed fever.
That’s a fever a woman gets because of a uterine infection after giving birth.
What really shocked Semmelweis is that more women in the First Clinic were getting this
than those giving birth in the streets.
Surely the clinic must be a safer environment, he thought.
The man then started looking at the data.
He saw that some of the wards were staffed by midwives, some by medical students, and
some by trained doctors.
Guess, what?
Way more women died that had been treated by the most educated people, the doctors.
Women were five times less likely to get the deadly fever if their baby was delivered by
a midwife.
“What is this deformity of reason,” wondered Semmelweis, and so he started doing some rounds
at the wards.
He noticed one major difference, and that was that at the midwives’ wards the women
had their kids on their side, and in the doctors’ clinic they gave birth on their backs.
Ok, thought Semmelweis, it’s just a matter of angles.
He ordered that all women now give birth on their sides.
Did it work?
No, they still kept dying at the same rate at the doctor’s clinic.
He was lost for an explanation, but then he saw that after a woman died in the First Clinic
a priest would walk up and down the wards ringing a bell.
For what reason, we don’t know, but Semmelweis wondered if the sound of a death bell stressed
the women, and this somehow made them sick.
He stopped the bell-ringing for a while.
This of course was a long shot, and it didn’t work.
Semmelweis became so frustrated by all of this, that he actually took a bit of time
off and got some fresh air in the Austrian countryside.
Still, it bugged him every day…why were all those women dying in that one clinic.
IT JUST MADE NO SENSE!
Then when he got back to the hospital he received more bad news.
His friend, a pathologist, had just died.
He’d been doing an autopsy on a woman who'd died from childbed fever.
He’d pricked his finger during that autopsy and his blood had mixed with hers.
He subsequently got a fever and later died.
Semmelweis then noticed something, his friend the pathologist had had the same symptoms
as someone with childbed fever.
It was a bit of a Eureka moment.
He knew that the fever wasn’t just something that pregnant women could get, but it was
some kind of thing that could be spread.
Then he had his second eureka moment.
He realized that the doctors at the First Clinic did a lot of autopsies, but the midwives
at the Second Clinic didn’t.
He thought about his dead pathologist friend and started connecting the dots....
This disease, he hypothesized, can be carried from one person to another.
This may all seem very elementary to you guys watching, but you have to remember that germ
science wasn’t invented yet.
Physicians had for years written theories about how diseases were spread, but microorganisms
and pathogens were not understood.
Semmelweis considered that in some of those cadavers that were being dissected there were
small particles of disease.
After digging around, a doctor would transfer that disease with his own hands to a pregnant
woman.
Particles from the corpses’ blood was getting into the woman’s blood and then she died,
infected from a dead person with the vector being the good but ignorant doctor.
Semmelweis then told everyone to wash their hands with soap and water, and after that
chlorine solution.
The latter is actually an amazing disinfectant, but Semmelweis didn’t know that because
he didn’t really understand germs.
He just told them to use it ‘cos it cleared up the smell of corpses on doctors’ hands.
What happened next of course was that suddenly lots of women were not getting the fever at
the First Clinic.
Hand-washing was a success.
Women no longer begged to be taken to the Second Clinic or secretly had their babies
in the streets.
Semmelweis told the medical community at large.
He said, guys, you know what, washing hands saves lives.
I have the data to prove this.
It’s incontestable.
You guys doing autopsies are spreading disease around.
In fact, everyone should start washing their hands.
It somehow stops diseases spreading.
They thought he was mad, and being the kings of the medical community, some of the leading
surgeons totally dismissed Semmelweis’s idea.
“What,” some surgeons thought, “You are saying we, the life-savers, the frontline
of medical science, are actually killing people.”
“Ugh…yes,” said Semmelweis…”
Please wash your hands.”
He made a lot of enemies.
Semmelweis was right, but he was also quite obsessed.
He ranted and raved about washing hands.
He shouted from the rooftops, and the higher ups in the medical community didn’t like
it.
They didn’t much like him.
Here was an upstart trying to say doctors killed their patients because they carried
invisible monsters on their hands.
Was that science or witchcraft!?
He actually got fired from the hospital, and yes, of course pregnant women started dying
again.
That’s because doctors stopped washing their hands.
Semmelweis was smeared and called a loon.
They did a number on him, berated him, as if he was some crazy charlatan spreading misinformation.
Science was about facts, they said, observable facts, not tiny invisible particles travelling
from dead bodies to pregnant women via a doctor.
Semmelweis found it hard to get a job after that.
They ruined him, and he was way ahead of all of them.
He didn’t give up at first, though.
He left Austria and travelled around Europe, telling medical professionals that if they
started washing their hands then disease would spread less easily.
No one believed him, or not many people...a few british scientists were actually on his
side.
Semmelweis knew that he could save lives, but hardly anyone was listening.
We should say that some younger students and medical men did take notice of Semmelweis
and try his disinfecting methods, but the old guard of science would not listen.
They controlled the gates to change, and they weren’t about to let a relatively unknown
Hungarian man inside the highest of castles.
Semmelweis ended up working back in Hungary and he actually saved tons of lives at a hospital
called St. Rochus, and that was because during an outbreak he made people wash their hands.
Well, he made them wash their hands all the time.
The hospital mortality rate greatly improved after Semmelweis turned up armed with data
and facts about soap and chlorine and the spread of disease.
He was then given the post of Professor of obstetrics at the University of Pest, but
you know what, those so-called leaders of science in Vienna still rejected him.
Some of them even went as far as to say that Semmelweis talked utter nonsense.
He didn’t give up, though, and wrote a book “The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis
of Childbed Fever”.
This showed how his disinfecting regimes had saved lives already and could save millions
more.
The book was rejected by the medical community.
When he gave talks around Europe he was virtually booed off-stage by the grey-bearded dinosaurs
of medicine.
We should say here that at this time Semmelweis was relatively young for someone making breakthroughs.
He was only in his mid-forties.
He got angrier and angrier and then one day he just cracked.
This might have been brought on by syphilis, but we don’t know, it could have been stress.
There are mixed opinions, but it’s likely he had a mental breakdown due to being roundly
rejected and knowing he could save so many people.
At the age of 47 he was committed to a mental asylum and died just a few months later.
How he died is not so clear.
It seems he had a wound on his hand and that wound got infected.
This led to sepsis and then death.
The reason he got that wound, though, is quite upsetting seeing what his great man had achieved.
You see, he was actually lured to the mental asylum by a famous Austrian physician named
Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra.
He told Semmelweis that he wanted to take him there to see a patient.
Once Semmelweis realized there was no patient and he had fallen for a trap, he tried to
escape.
The guards put him in a straight-jacket and subsequently beat him quite badly.
He was thrown into a dark cell, occasionally doused in cold water, and that wound on his
hand festered until his blood was poisoned.
Two decades after Semmelweis died, Louis Pasteur, the famous French biologist and microbiologist,
would confirm that Semmelweis was indeed right.
Pasteur proved that infectious particles spread disease and certainly that of childbed fever.
His experiments in Germ Theory, that of pathogens spreading disease, were groundbreaking, and
they proved that Semmelweis had been right all along.
British scientist, Joseph Lister, who’s now called the “Father of Antiseptic Medicine”,
some years later said Semmelweis should be hailed as a hero.
Finally, medical science believed him.
Lister wrote, “I think with the greatest admiration of him and his achievement and
it fills me with joy that at last he is given the respect due to him.”
Sometimes the old guard just reject new, groundbreaking ideas, and that still happens today.
But there’s a happy ending to this story, because when that happens and it turns out
the larger intellectual community is wrong, we have a term for what they suffered from.
That term is the “Semmelweis reflex.”
For more things you should be scared of go watch, “Diseases That Will Kill You The
Quickest.”
Or if that’s not to your liking, take a look at this….