Can you guys see him through recovery? Yah I’ll take it. No, I can do it.
It's common practice for doctors to scrub up before performing surgery or delivering babies.
But this was not always the case.
In the mid-19th century, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was the first to figure out
how to prevent doctors from spreading a deadly infection to pregnant women.
In 1846, he was appointed as an assistant in the maternity
ward of the renowned Vienna General Hospital.
While there, he noticed something peculiar.
The maternal mortality rate in the ward run by doctors and medical
students was significantly higher than in the ward run by midwives.
Between 1841 to 1846, 4 women out of 100 died in the clinic run by midwives.
Whereas the one handled by doctors and
medical students had a striking 10 women out of 100 lose their lives.
Why would mortality rates be so different between the two wards?
Semmelweiss was baffled and wrote:
“Everything was in question; everything seemed inexplicable;
everything was doubtful. Only the large number of deaths was an unquestionable reality.”
Pregnant women assigned to the ward with the doctors
begged to be transferred to the other ward.
They were so afraid they preferred to give birth on the streets,
where they had a lower chance of dying from the mysterious disease.
Semmelweiss vowed to get to the bottom of what was going on.
Then, in March 1847, came a breakthrough.
His colleague Jakob Kolletschka had performed an autopsy, and a student
accidentally pricked his finger with a scalpel.
He died from an infection similar to the one that afflicted the women.
Semmelweis realized doctors started each day performing autopsies on the women who had died
shortly after giving birth, and then, examined pregnant women without washing their hands.
Whereas the midwives had never handled dead bodies.
He hypothesized that the doctors were transferring
some kind of “cadaverous particles” from the dead bodies to the pregnant women.
Doctors at the time didn’t know that bacteria caused infections.
They believed diseases were caused by bad odors,
humidity, the stress of giving birth, or some kind of imbalance in the body.
Bacterial infections entering the reproductive tract can
cause severe complications during or after birth.
An infection known as puerperal fever or childbed fever can lead to intense fevers,
foul-smelling discharge, and excruciating pain.
Death often occurred within days of giving birth.
Newborns could also contract the infection and die.
So, Semmelweis ordered his medical staff to wash their hands with a disinfectant chemically related
to chlorine to remove the smell of decaying corpses…before attending to the pregnant women.
The mortality rate dropped immediately.
In 1848, the clinic run by doctors and medical students fell to 1 death per 100 births,
which was slightly below the rate of the clinic run by midwives.
When Semmelweis wrote to the heads of several maternity clinics about
his discovery, you’d think they’d be eager to embrace hand-washing.
But they refused.
The prominent American obstetrician Charles Meigs famously said:
“Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean.”
Many doctors pushed back against the suggestion that
they were to blame for their patients’ deaths.
It didn’t help that Semmelweis waited 13 years
before officially publishing his findings, in which he lamented:
“...my teachings are either ignored or attacked.”
He continued to urge the medical community to listen to him, writing:
“...this truth must be made known to everyone concerned.”
His book was long and included heavily convoluted passages that didn’t help his case.
Semmelweis was also difficult to deal with.
He’s been described as having “...a temper like a rattlesnake and was outrageously
rude to anyone who questioned his ideas,” said Dr. Irvine Loudon,
who was a medical historian and author of "The Tragedy of Childbed Fever."
Not long after Semmelweis made his discovery, the head of the obstetrics department at Vienna
General Hospital refused to renew his contract, another example of the resistance to his ideas.
He abruptly left Vienna to return home to Budapest,
where he worked at a hospital and continued to advocate for hand washing.
Despite virtually eliminating maternal mortality at the hospital in Budapest,
his ideas were still rejected.
The professor of obstetrics at the University of Pest, Ede Flórián Birly,
maintained his belief that childbed fever was caused by uncleanliness of the bowel.
When Birly passed, Semmelweis took over his position at the
university and grew increasingly erratic.
He wrote angry letters to his critics, calling them “irresponsible murderers.”
He became severely depressed and began drinking heavily and spending more time
away from his wife and five children and in the company of prostitutes.
The University fired him for his inappropriate behavior.
It’s believed he may have developed early-onset dementia.
Or perhaps, the criticism of his life’s work caused him to suffer a mental breakdown.
In 1865, Austrian physician Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra lured him to a mental asylum in
Vienna under the premise of showing Semmelweis the facilities. Landes-Irren-Anstalt in Lazarettgasse
When Semmelweis realized he was actually being admitted as a patient, he tried to leave.
That’s when several guards beat him up, put him in a straitjacket, and threw him into a cell.
He died two weeks later at the age of 47.
Very few people attended his funeral.
His autopsy revealed he died from blood poisoning from a
wound on his hand that he could have sustained from the beating.
Ironically, the man who spent his life fighting against the
spread of infections died from an infection.
Two years after his death, French microbiologist Louis Pasteur made a monumental discovery.
Pasteur realized that bacteria were spoiling wine.
And that these microorganisms were not only responsible for spoiling food and
drink but also for spreading infectious diseases.
Unlike Pasteur, Semmelweis had not taken the time to examine particles under a microscope.
Had he been a more diligent scientist, If he had, he would have seen that they
were teeming with bacteria, which could have made his case for handwashing more convincing.
Pasteur’s work inspired Scottish surgeon Sir
Joseph Lister to introduce the concept of antisepsis,
the practice of using chemical agents to prevent the growth of bacteria on living tissue.
Listerine is named after Dr. Lister.
By this point, Semmelweis was all but forgotten; Lister had never even heard of him!
Hand washing and sterilizing medical instruments finally started to become standard practice in the
1860s, twenty years after Semmelweis warned doctors about the importance of hygiene.
Had his sanitation techniques been implemented earlier,
there’s no telling how many lives would have been saved.
Given that the death rate for women who gave birth in hospitals was as high as
20% in some instances, it could have been in the hundreds of thousands or even more.
It was only decades later that Semmelweis finally started to gain recognition,
as the medical community became more receptive of the germ theory of disease.
He’s now widely known as the “savior of mothers”.
Semmelweis once said:
“When I look back upon the past, I can only dispel the sadness which falls upon
me by gazing into that happy future when the infection will be banished.”
Sadly, he never lived to see that day.
As we've seen with Semmelweis's work,
the power of scientific thinking can lead to life-saving advancements.
If you’d like to sharpen your science, technology, engineering, and math skills,
I recommend Brilliant.org, a website and app where you can learn through physical insight.
My viewers especially love their Scientific Thinking course, where you can, for example,
figure out how to make this bridge as rigid as possible with as few beams as possible.
There's everything from computer science to foundational and advanced math to data science.
Brilliant is great for both beginners and those who want to improve on what they already know,
which is crucial to help you stay ahead in today's competitive marketplace.
As you progress through their lessons, you can dive deeper into more advanced topics.
I personally use Brilliant to boost my analytical thinking
skills by going through their logic puzzles.
Brilliant supports you every step of the way. If you’re stuck,
you can view the explanation to see where you went wrong.
You can try out Brilliant for free for 30 days by heading to the custom
link in my description: brilliant.org/newsthink.
And the first 200 people who sign up with my link will get 20% off their
Premium subscription, which gives you access to all the offerings.
Thanks for watching. I’m Cindy Pom.