Ignaz Semmelweis Born / Ghana declared a republic - July 1

Ignaz Semmelweis, known as the father of infection control, was born on this day in 1818. / On this day in 1960, Ghana was declared a republic, and Kwame Nkrumah was inaugurated as president.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all, Eve's here. Today's episode contains not just one,
but two nuggets of history. These are coming from the
T d I H Vault, so you'll also here to hosts.
Consider it a double feature. Enjoy the show, Hi, and
welcome to this day in History class. It is July one,

(00:20):
and Ignace semil Weiss was born on this day in Buddha, Hungary,
which is part of Budapest now. He was known as
everything from the savior of mothers to the father of
infection control. So here are the highlights of his life
and work. First up, he was an obstetrician, but obstetrics
was a brand new medical field until the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. In Europe. Midwives were usually the

(00:42):
people who delivered babies. It was not common at all
for a doctor to be involved. The doctors were almost
universal eate men, and it was so rare for a
doctor to be involved that when obstetricians arrived on a
scene and started delivering babies in some places they were
called man midwives. Some of us was also a teacher.
He worked at Vienna Algamini Crunkin House or the General Hospital,

(01:05):
which was like a teaching hospital today. So he was
teaching medical students, he was helping them with difficult deliveries.
He was also keeping records, keeping up with all the
clerical files for the school and the patients, and that
put him in a really unique position to realize the
magnitude of a big problem that was facing the general hospital,
and that was that there were two clinics, one staffed

(01:28):
by midwives and mid midwiffery students and the other staffed
by doctors and medical students. And the midwiffery clinic had
about a third of the maternal deaths of the doctor's clinic,
three times more people dying in the doctor's clinic of
something called childbed fever also called purer pearl fever as
in the midwives clinic. This was not acceptable and it

(01:50):
was not acceptable to the patients either. People who showed
up at the hospital and learned that it was the
doctor's day to take new patients would literally have babies
out on the street to avoid going into the hospital
and risking their lives with the doctors. So Ignot someone
Vice thought this was completely mortifying and unacceptable, and he
started trying to figure out what was causing this problem.

(02:12):
He compared everything that he could think of between the
doctor's clinic and the midwives clinic. He compared what the
patients were eating, he compared the religions of the people
that were working in both clinics. He compared how overcrowded
they were, and it turned out, unsurprisingly, the midwives clinic
was the more crowded clinic. People clearly wanted to go

(02:33):
there much more than they wanted to go to the
doctor's clinic. He couldn't figure out what the problem was
until a friend of his nicked his finger during an
autopsy and then later died of something that seemed a
whole lot like childbed fever. So that gave Ignot civil
Bites an idea that maybe it was the hands of
the medical students that were the problem. They were conducting

(02:53):
autopsies and then they were delivering babies, and they weren't
washing their hands in between. Because the germ theory of disease,
these didn't really exist, neither did surgical gloves. They didn't
come along until much later, and he came up with
a revolutionary idea for how to fix this problem, and
that was to have the medical students wash their hands
between conducting an autopsy and delivering a baby. So he

(03:15):
instituted this practice. He had all of the medical students
wash their hands anytime they had done an autopsy before
they actually went into the ward and started delivering babies,
and the rate of maternal death plummeted. Three months or
so after he started this process. In August of eighteen
forty seven, which was just a couple of months after
he put this process into place, there were zero maternal

(03:39):
deaths from child bed fever in the doctor's clinic, and
that was the first time that had happened since the
medical students started conducting autopsies. It was a really big deal.
But when he started trying to encourage all of his
colleagues to start this hand washing, they did not respond well.
They didn't welcome him with open arms, saying thank you

(03:59):
so much. You have taught us how we can stopped
literally killing our patients. Instead, they made fun of him.
They completely dismissed his ideas. His boss said that it
was not handwashing at all. It was the brand new
ventilation system which was drawing terrible miasmas out of the hospital.
That was really why patients had stopped dying. None of

(04:20):
those people were correct, ignat simil vice was correct. He
got increasingly upset about the fact that his colleagues were
not taking his advice and were in fact being unkind
and cruel to him about it. He eventually left Vienna
in the middle of the night, didn't tell anybody where
he was going, and he got other jobs elsewhere and
similarly reduced the maternal death rate at the places where

(04:43):
he worked by having people wash their hands. So he
had always been kind of a stubborn person, maybe not
very easy to get along with, and his behavior started
to become increasingly erratic. He finally wrote a whole book
on his experiences and his theories in eighteen sixty one,
and parts of it were great, but parts of it
were just these rambling diet tribes against the people that
had criticized him and had been teaching their students to

(05:05):
ignore his theories. His wife became convinced that there was
something truly wrong, and so he was institutionalized in eighteen
sixty five, and he died in that institution on August
thirteenth of that year, at the age of forty seven.
His cause of death was probably sept a semia, but
his former employer back in Vienna did an autopsy and
found that he had evidence of severe injuries. It seems

(05:28):
as though he was probably mistreated in that asylum where
he ultimately died. So when Ignat some of Vice died,
people like Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister and Robert Coke
were all doing the work that would become the germ
theory of disease, and by about the eighteen eighties, the
exact same infection control procedures that he had put into

(05:50):
effect decades earlier were common practice in the field of obstetrics.
Hungarian doctor published a paper about some of Vice in
eighteen eighty seven. At that point that he was sort
of bringing him out of obscurity, everybody had forgotten about him,
and it's only been since that time that people have
started to realize what a groundbreaker he was. You can
learn more about Ignace civil Vice and the other doctors

(06:12):
who were making similar strides at about the same time
in the March episode of Stuff You Missed in History
Class called Ignat Sevil Vice and the War on hand Washing.
You can subscribe to this day in History class on
Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts.
Tomorrow we have a story of a rebellion and a
trial which has a cameo by John Quincy Adams. Hello,

(06:44):
Welcome to this day in History class, where we flipped
through the book of history and bring you a new
page every day. The day was July one, nineteen six.
The new Constitution of Ghana went into effect, transforming the

(07:04):
country from one with a parliamentary system to one with
a republican form of government. The Republic of Ghana was
formally proclaimed and Prime Minister Quama and Kruma was inaugurated
as president. Before independence, Ghana was known as the Gold Coast,
a British colony. The British exploited and exported the resources

(07:26):
in the Gold Coast, including gold, diamonds, ivory, coco, timber,
and manganese. As this economy developed, it supported the construction
of harbors, railways, roads, schools, and hospitals. European interference in
the economics and politics of the region had broken down
the traditional social order of the groups there, but by

(07:49):
the end of World War two people had begun protesting
for more autonomy from the British. Sentiments of nationalism had
reached a peak, and movements developed in position to colonial
administration with the goal of independence. A moderate party called
the United Gold Coast Convention or u g c C

(08:09):
formed in nineteen forty seven to pursue constitutional reform and
eventual self government. Quama and Kruma was the general secretary
of the party, but in nineteen forty nine he split
with the u g c C and formed the Revolutionary
Convention People's Party or c p P. Kruma and the
c p P called for self government now, and it

(08:32):
gained widespread popular support. In nineteen fifty the c p
P began a campaign of so called positive action, encouraging
nonviolent resistance and strikes against colonial authorities. Kruma was soon
arrested and imprisoned for a sedition, but the c p
P won a majority of the seats in the first

(08:53):
elections for the Legislative Assembly, and Kruma was released from
prison to become the leader of government. This nos in
nineteen fifty two, and Kroma became the first Prime Minister
of the Gold Coast. In nineteen fifty six, the British
Togoland Trust Territory integrated with the Gold Coast and on

(09:14):
March sixth, nineteen fifty seven. After centuries of being a
center for the export of enslaved people and then being
subject to European control, the Gold Coast gained its independence
from Britain and became an independent, self governing member of
the Commonwealth of Nations. The country was renamed Ghana. It
was the first black Sub Saharan country in colonial Africa

(09:37):
to achieve independence. Kroma was a Marxist and Pan Africanists,
and he viewed the independence of Ghana as an important
step for the entire continent of Africa. Though his rule
was increasingly regarded as authoritarian, he improved infrastructure and social
conditions in Ghana. The working class was thriving, but the

(09:58):
country was still an end of pendent constitutional monarchy, with
Queen Elizabeth the Second as its head of state. In
April of nineteen sixty, a plebiscite or constitutional referendum took
place on the issue of Ghana becoming a republic. About
eighty eight percent of the voters supported the change. Kroma

(10:19):
was elected President of the Republic with eight percent of
the vote. He was inaugurated on July one, nineteen sixty
when the new Constitution of Ghana went into effect. Ghana
became a republic in the Commonwealth of Nations, so Kroma
had support. Initially, people began to resent him and the administration,

(10:39):
which was suffering under dead and corruption. There were several
assassination attempts on the President's life. Four years after Ghana
became a republic and Kroma was elected president, a constitutional
amendment made Ghana a one party state and Kroma declared
himself life president of the country and the party. But

(11:00):
as Kurma tried to advance his vision of a United
Africa and empowered activists, the economy and living standards in
Ghana suffered in opposition to the regime grew. In February
of nineteen sixty six, while the president was visiting China,
Kroma's government was overthrown by a coup of the Ghana
Armed Forces. The National Liberation Council took over the government

(11:24):
and suspended the constitution, and Crema found refuge in Guinea
until nineteen one, when Jerry Rawlings came to power. Ghana's
government saw many coups and alternating military and civilian regimes.
I'm Eves Jeff Cote, and hopefully you know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. If you

(11:46):
have any burning questions or comments to tell us. You
can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at t
D I h C podcast. You can subscribe to this
dand history class on Apple podcasts, the I heart Radio app,
or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you tomorrow.

(12:18):
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