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1847 CEPeer-reviewed · 2 sourcesWell documented

Semmelweis Asks Doctors to Wash Their Hands

A Vienna obstetrician cuts childbed-fever deaths from 18 percent to 1 percent, and is ridiculed for it

On the timeline · around 1847 CE · Germ Theory and Modern MedicineAnatomy and Early Modern MedicineGerm Theory and Modern MedicineSemmelweis Asks Doctors to Wash Their Hands18001825185018751900

Quick facts

Where
Vienna General Hospital
When
1847
Intervention
Handwashing with chlorinated lime
Mortality change
18.27% to 1.27% (1848)

What happened

At the Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s there were two obstetrics clinics: one staffed by physicians and medical students, the other by midwives. The doctors' clinic had a far higher rate of fatal childbed fever. Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that medical students and physicians often moved directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies without washing their hands. In 1847 the puzzle sharpened when his colleague Jakob Kolletschka died after his hand was cut with a scalpel during an autopsy, showing symptoms like those of the dying mothers. Semmelweis required all doctors and medical students to disinfect their hands with chlorinated lime before examining pregnant women. The mortality rate in his ward fell dramatically, from 18.27 percent to 1.27 percent, in 1848. His findings were met with skepticism and hostility from colleagues who could not accept that their own hands carried death, and the fight to have his ideas accepted took a severe toll on him.

Why it matters

Semmelweis produced hard evidence for hand hygiene decades before germ theory could explain why it worked, and the profession's rejection of that evidence is a lasting caution about how data can lose to prestige and habit. His numbers were later vindicated completely; handwashing remains one of the simplest and most effective ways to prevent infection in medicine.

How we know

Semmelweis's intervention, the death of Kolletschka, and the drop in ward mortality are documented in hospital records and his own published work, and are recounted in institutional and peer-reviewed medical histories.

Sources

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Semmelweis Asks Doctors to Wash Their Hands · History of Medicine · SourcedStory