Ignaz Semmelweis, aka "savior of mothers", is an unacclaimed hero for his advances in the antiseptic method. His discovery has saved many mothers from death from puerperal fever, or childbed fever.
Ignaz Semmelweis, aka "savior of mothers", is an unacclaimed hero for his advances in the antiseptic method. His discovery has saved many mothers from death from puerperal fever, or childbed fever.
Childbed fever
Early in his career, Ignaz Semmelwies ended up in various maternity wards in Europe. Here he found that up to 25% of women in these wards died of childbed fever. Unlike his colleagues, Semmelweis did not find that overcrowding, diet and poor ventilation were the cause of the infection.
Wash your hands
While working at the Allgemeines krankenhaus in Vienna, Semmelweis noticed a marked difference in the number of deaths in different maternity wards. There were more deaths in the ward staffed by medical students than in those staffed by maternity women. As a result, Semmelweis suggested that the students may have transmitted the infection to healthy women during childbirth.
After the death of a friend who contracted an infection during the inquest of a woman who died of childbed fever, Semmelweis concluded that students transmitted the disease from corpses used in anatomy classes to the healthy women in the maternity ward. Semmelweis therefore suggested that students should wash their hands with bleach before entering the maternity ward and when moving from patient to patient. This reduced the number of deaths in the maternity ward by 99%!
Unacclaimed but certainly not lost
Semmelweis was fired in 1848. The reason that was given was because of his liberal-political sympathies, but the real reason was that his superior did not agree with Semmelweis's new method. Despite his dismissal, Semmelweis was able to put his knowledge to good use in the following years in a hospital in Budapest, where he also managed to reduce the average death rate in the maternity ward to below 1%. When Semmelweis finally shared his findings in the form of a publication in 1861, his colleagues still did not agree with him.
In 1865, Semmelweis died not long after being admitted to a mental hospital as a result of a mental breakdown. Sadly, Semmelweis never got the fame he deserved, but his knowledge certainly hasn't been lost. In the 90s of the 19th century, his work was finally accepted in medical science.