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they deliver babies they help you when
you're sick they are the ones who
examine all the things doctors keep her
health in check and they spend years of
training to do it but that wasn't always
the case
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medicine for most of the 19th century
was completely different to how it is
now in America there was virtually no
regulation at all
anybody could declare himself or herself
to be a physician most physicians
graduated never having practiced at the
bedside never having performed surgery
and they probably never even seen a
laboratory this was not a lucrative
profession it didn't tend to attract
people coming from money and very few
people were willing to invest a lot of
money in an education so basically it
was a job no one really wanted to do on
top of that medical science itself was
still unsophisticated many surgeons
weren't totally sure what even caused
infections so to treat some of them it
often just cut off a person's limbs no
big deal they were also pretty mad about
keeping their practice sterile if you're
a surgeon in the 1860s the 1870s you
might well try and keep your wards clean
and the surgical table clean ish yep yes
you're very likely to be operating in
another apron which is staged and
encrusted with blood and other bodily
fluids which have accumulated over
perhaps decades in fact many surgeons
would wear their bloody leather apron as
a badge of honor because it revealed to
everybody just how many operations you'd
performed
it would take years before they learned
how unsanitary this was and before they
decided hey maybe we shouldn't do that
up until then doctors and scientists
slowly began to prove that illnesses and
infections were caused by microscopic
organisms this idea called the germ
theory was a big deal at the time but a
lot of people didn't buy it people would
say there's absolutely no way that a
tiny microscopic organism could possibly
kill an organism as big as we are you
ignore some of us Semmelweis was a
Hungarian who was working in a maternity
ward in Austria and in the 1840s he
noticed that women who gave birth in one
particular Ward they were dying much
more commonly than the mothers who were
giving birth in a nearby ward there was
a big difference between these two wards
in the first one doctors and medical
students who spent part of the day in
the morgue and the rest of the day in
deliveries they were passing these germs
from the corpses to the first thing
women and leaving extraordinarily
tragically high numbers of babies
without a mother the other ward was run
by nurses who did not participate in
autopsies and that's why those mothers
were far far less off and dying
Semmelweis argues that some kind of
living matter is killing these women and
the doctors were transferring it from
the dead to the living so we installed a
bowl of disinfectant and insisted that
all of the carers wash their hands in it
the rates of death plummeted the sad
thing is people still didn't get on
board with similar vices argument about
this living matter but why there were a
lot of reasons but one of them is that
it was absolutely intolerable for a
large number of physicians and
obstetricians
to recognize that there unwittingly
caused the deaths of hundreds or even
thousands of women
many of them just simply couldn't accept
this but by the 1880s after more and
more scientific proof a lot of Surgeons
started accepting the fact that germs
caused illness they even began to make
some changes they're starting to wash
their hands they're also starting to use
tools which don't have any spaces where
bacteria could gather you think about
your classic scalpel you have a wooden
handle and then you have the metal blade
any number of places in which bacteria
could secrete themselves and then cause
infection by the early 1900's are
starting also to wear latex gloves so
surgery become safer and it was in less
than a generation that surgery was
becoming revolutionized in this way and
once physicians and scientists knew
which germs are causing certain
illnesses they developed the first
vaccines to target specific diseases and
then antibiotics to treat infections and
save a lot of looms and some of ice it
wasn't until germ theory was fully
established that people looked back and
rediscovered some of ice in the early
20th century the late 19th century
statues to him are erected all sorts of
biographies are written he's hailed as a
great hero once surgeons could guarantee
a clean environment in which to operate
the entire field of surgery just
awesomes I think becomes the most
prestigious field of medicine he also
see huge changes in the way doctors were
trained by the early 20th century over
100 medical schools were founded in the
US and training became more intensive
medical students began to truly learn
the science behind medicine it was a
first time in human history the medical
scientists really knew what caused
people to die of infectious disease the
immediate offspring of this more public
health better public health better
cleaner so
is already starting to save lives it's
quite a remarkable thing to see
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