Until the second half of the 19th century, in the large maternity wards of city hospitals, hundreds of new mothers died mysteriously from puerperal fever, a serious infection of the uterus caused by various bacteria (streptococcus, Escherichia coli, and others) that infect the endometrium after it has been damaged by childbirth or a miscarriage.
The Hungarian doctor Ignaz P. Semmelweis, an assistant at an obstetric clinic in Vienna, after making a series of observations, hypothesized that this condition might be caused by the doctors themselves, who often went to examine new mothers right after performing autopsies. In the other ward of the clinic, where only midwives and nurses worked, the incidence of puerperal fever was in fact significantly lower.
To test his hypothesis, he ordered everyone in his department to clean their nails with a brush and disinfect their hands with a chlorinated lime solution before coming into contact with patients. Thanks to this simple precaution, it was possible to sharply reduce deaths (from 11% to 1% within about two years).
His discovery, which he described in his work «The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever», was nonetheless opposed by the doctors of his time. Rather than being interested in carrying out new experiments to verify it and allow medicine to advance, they had Semmelweis expelled from the hospital where he worked. Back in Hungary, he met the same fate at St. Rocco Hospital in Budapest (despite cases of puerperal fever having dropped considerably there too) and was forced to resign from the university chair that had previously been offered to him.
The refusal to recognize his discovery, and the hostility he faced, led him into depression: his enemies took advantage of this to have him committed to an asylum, where he died a short time later, at the age of 47, from an infection contracted during an autopsy he had performed.
In 1894, 15 years after his death, the obstetric clinic in Vienna was nonetheless named after him, and a commemorative monument was erected in Budapest.
Bibliography
Céline, Il dottor Semmelweis, Ed. Adelphi, 2006