Why Was the Doctor Who Told Surgeons to Wash Their Hands Called Mad?
TL;DR: In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis cut maternal deaths from childbed fever from 18.3% to about 1-2% at Vienna General Hospital — simply by making doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime. Instead of gratitude, the medical establishment ridiculed him, stripped him of his post, and in 1865 he died in a mental asylum. Two decades later, Pasteur's germ theory proved him right. Why did mothers die three times more often in one clinic than the other? In the 1840s, Vienna General Hospital ran two maternity clinics side by side. In the First Clinic, where doctors and medical students delivered babies, childbed fever killed more than one mother in ten at its worst. In the Second Clinic, run by midwives, the death rate was only 2-4%. The difference was nearly threefold. The killer was childbed fever — a bacterial infection spreading through the blood after childbirth, killing within days. The medical establishment of the day blamed "bad air" (miasma). What convinced him th...