Ignaz Semmelweis
1818 – 1865 · Hungary
Known for: The physician who proved that handwashing prevents childbed fever, decades before germ theory
“He counted the dead until the living could be saved.”
Biography
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was born on 1 July 1818 in the Tabán district of Buda, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austrian Empire, the fifth of ten children of the grocer József Semmelweis and Teréz Müller, a family of German ancestry that had prospered from a wholesale trade in spices and consumer goods run under the sign of the White Elephant. He went to the University of Vienna in the autumn of 1837 to study law and soon abandoned it for medicine, taking his doctorate in 1844. When no appointment in internal medicine came his way, he turned to obstetrics, a field then held in modest regard, and studied under Carl von Rokitansky, Joseph Škoda and Ferdinand von Hebra, men who trained him in pathological anatomy and in the habit of counting things.
On 1 July 1846 he became assistant to Professor Johann Klein in the First Obstetrical Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital. The hospital had two maternity divisions, and their death rates from puerperal fever differed starkly: roughly ten per cent in the First Clinic against under four in the Second, staffed by midwives. Women pleaded not to be sent to the first, and some gave birth deliberately in the streets, where the fever was rare. Semmelweis ruled out crowding, climate and the position of delivery. In 1847 his colleague Jakob Kolletschka died after a scalpel wound received during a post mortem, and the autopsy findings resembled those of the dead mothers. Concluding that cadaverous particles were carried on physicians' hands, he required washing in chlorinated lime. Mortality in the clinic had stood at 18.3 per cent in April 1847; by June it was 2.2, by July 1.2, and in two months of the following year no mother died at all.
The medical establishment of Vienna did not accept the finding. Semmelweis could offer no theory of why cleanliness worked, germ theory being still unformulated, and colleagues took offence at the implication that their hands were lethal. He lost his position, was harassed, and returned to Hungary, publishing his evidence in 1861 as Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. His protests grew more vehement and more isolated. In 1865 he was committed to an asylum, where guards beat him; he died on 13 August, two weeks later, of infection in a wound on his right hand. Within a generation Louis Pasteur supplied the explanation he had lacked and Joseph Lister built surgical antisepsis upon it. His birthplace in Budapest is now a museum of medical history.