One of the most effective ways to avoid catching the flu and coronavirus is to wash your hands regularly, and the man who discovered it died on August 13, 1865. The US Centers for Disease Control advises washing hands with soap and water for 20 seconds. Believe it or not, this kind of medical advice would have been scandalous in the 19th century.
In Europe in the 1840s, large numbers of mothers died of puerperal fever. Despite the best medical care available at the time, women fell ill and died soon after giving birth.
The Hungarian doctor Ignac Semmelweis (Ignaz Semmelweis, 1818-1865) wanted to find out why this happens. He worked at the General Hospital in Vienna, where there were two separate maternity wards. He noticed that the death rate from fever was much lower if midwives participated in the delivery, while women left to doctors and medical students died at twice the rate.
As Index writes, Semmelweiss decided to test several of his assumptions. He tried to determine whether the position of the mother during childbirth or the feeling of shame of being examined by a doctor, who is a man, has any influence on this phenomenon. He thought it might be a fear of priests visiting patients dying of fever. In the end, he estimated that none of these factors represented the right answer.
Particles from corpses
After realizing what was not the cause of the infection, he managed to find the real culprit. It was corpses all along. More precisely, doctors and students would perform autopsies every morning, and later in the day they would visit mothers in the maternity ward and give birth to them. On the other hand, the midwives did not have access to the corpses. They worked exclusively in the maternity hospital.
Semmelweis hypothesized that doctors and students transferred particles from the bodies of the deceased to the women in labor. In contrast to modern practice, doctors at that time did not have to wash their hands before the visit, so they simply returned the pathogens they encountered during the autopsy to the maternity ward, Index writes.
Microbes were still a big unknown then, so Zemmelweis called them "decomposing animal organic matter".
Colleagues criticized him
After concluding that women were dying of fever after contact with doctors, in 1847 Semmelweis introduced mandatory hand washing for students and doctors who worked with him at the General Hospital in Vienna.
Instead of soap, he used a solution of chlorinated lime, because it removed the unpleasant smell of a decaying corpse that lingered on the hands of the doctor. As soon as hospital staff started disinfecting medical instruments and their own hands, the death rate in the maternity ward dropped.
In the spring of 1850, Zemmelweis addressed his colleagues during a meeting of the prestigious Viennese Medical Society. His recommendation to disinfect hands before contact with patients was widely rejected on the grounds that there was neither scientific basis nor logical explanation for such a claim.
Historians believe that they categorically rejected his theory also because, in a way, he accused them of the death of a large number of patients, writes National Geographic.
Despite the positive results, the Vienna General Hospital abandoned the practice of hand washing in the maternity ward.
His legacy was recognized posthumously
A difficult period in Zemmelweis's life followed. He moved to Pest, where he also got a job in a maternity hospital. And there he introduced the practice of hand washing, which brought success, just like in Vienna. Despite this, his idea was not approved, and the book he wrote on the subject was heavily criticized by his colleagues.
As time went on, his health deteriorated. There are indications that he suffered from syphilis or Alzheimer's disease. He was taken to psychiatric treatment, after which he soon died of sepsis due to an infected wound on his hand.
Two years later, Scottish surgeon Joseph Lister advocated the idea of disinfecting hands and medical instruments, which fared much better. Although there were some who objected, in the 1870s doctors began to wash their hands before surgery.
Soon after, Semmelweis's work was also recognized, and he significantly contributed to the development of Louis Pasteur's theory of microbes, which drastically changed the way doctors approach patients, as well as the understanding of the spread of disease.
Although surgeons began disinfecting their hands before surgery as early as the 1870s, the importance of hand washing to public health was not recognized until a century later. The Medical University in Budapest today bears Zemmelweiss's name.
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