Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss: an unrecognized genius in his time.

Ignaz Semmelweiss was a doctor in a Vienna general hospital in 1845 where women could give birth in two departments: one served by midwifes and their students and the other managed by doctors and medical students. In the second department, puerperal infections (caught during delivery) were devastating for the women. The mortality rate exceeded 30% there while in the other department the mortality rate rarely exceeded 1 or 2%. Even the poor women who delivered in the street did not have higher mortality rates.

Before 1840, medical students only studied anatomy in books; after that date, they practised dissecting on corpses. Semmelweiss noted that mortality rates in the department managed by doctors had considerably increased after the new study methods were adopted. He also saw that students and doctors went directly from the dissection area to the labour room. He therefore deducted that both students and doctors hands were vectors of fevers, that “an invisible agent was carried from the corpses to young mothers”. He then had the idea of having students wash their hands in a calcium chloride solution. Puerperal fever rates fell considerably thereafter. However, in spite of those results, nobody believed. Even the Order of Doctors was counted among his many detractors. Semmelweiss was revoked. No one wanted to believe in the “invisible agent”. He spent the rest of his life fighting to prove the validity of his theory but never succeeded.

His life ended very sadly after being admitted to an insane asylum where he died in 1885 from a badly washed wound, killed by the famous microbes he had been the only one to accuse. Almost a kind of revenge of the invisible…

Semmelweiss had discovered the principle of nosocomial infections transmitted by hands and the antiseptic value of a product.

As Louis Pasteur said: “Gentlemen, microbes will have the last word”.