Interesting how the same attitudes still exists today in the medical profession as well as the public. Truth that contradicts a previously accepted lie is rejected, despite overwhelming evidence.
For centuries, one of the deadliest places a woman could be was in a maternity ward. The killer wasn’t a disease with a name, but the hands of the very doctors meant to help them.
In 1847, a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis at Vienna’s General Hospital noticed a horrifying trend. Women in the ward attended by doctors and medical students were dying of ‘childbed fever’ at a rate nearly five times higher than women in the midwives’ ward.
He searched for the difference and found a chilling one. The doctors often came directly from performing autopsies in the morgue to delivering babies, with nothing but a cursory wipe of their hands in between.
Semmelweis theorized that ‘cadaverous particles’ were being transferred, causing the infections. He ordered his staff to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution before examining patients.
The results were immediate and astounding. The death rate in his ward plummeted by over 90%.
But Semmelweis wasn’t hailed as a hero. He was mocked and ostracized. The medical establishment was insulted by the idea that a gentleman’s hands could be unclean and carry death. Their pride was more important than the lives of their patients.
His contract was not renewed. Professionally ruined and increasingly distraught, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum in 1865. In a tragic twist of fate, he died there at just 47 years old from an infected wound on his own hand—the very type of infection he had dedicated his life to preventing.
It would be years before his work was proven right by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, but the cost of pride had already been paid in countless lives.