Ignaz Semmelweis Born - July 1, 1818

Ignaz Semmelweis, known as the father of infection control, was born on this day in 1818.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, and welcome to this day in history class. It
is July one, and Ignace Semial 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

(00:25):
until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Europe.
Midwives were usually the 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. Semilvis was also

(00:48):
a teacher. He worked at Vienna Algamini Crunkin House or
the General Hospital, which was like a teaching hospital today.
So he was teaching medical students, he was helping them
with difficult deliveries. He was all so 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

(01:11):
was facing the general hospital, and that was that there
were two clinics, one staffed 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

(01:32):
also called puer pearl fever as in the midwives clinic.
This was not acceptable and it 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

(01:54):
completely mortifying and unacceptable, and he started trying to figure
out what was causing this problem. 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

(02:14):
turned out, unsurprisingly, the midwives clinic was the more crowded clinic.
People clearly wanted to go 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 child bed fever.
So that gave ignorant civil bites and idea that maybe

(02:37):
it was the hands of the medical students that were
the problem. They were conducting autopsies and then they were
delivering babies, and they weren't washing their hands in between
because the germ theory of disease 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 can decting an autopsy

(03:01):
and delivering a baby. So he 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

(03:21):
just a couple of months after he put this process
into place, there were zero maternal 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

(03:45):
him with open arms, saying thank you 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

(04:05):
patients had stopped dying. None of 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

(04:29):
death rate at the places where 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

(04:51):
had been teaching their students to ignore his theories. His
wife became convinced that there was something truly wrong, and
so he was institutional 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

(05:11):
in Vienna did an autopsy and found that he had
evidence of severe injuries. It seems as though he was
probably mistreated in that asylum where he ultimately died. So
when ignat seal 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

(05:32):
about the eighteen eighties, the exact same infection control procedures
that he had put into effect decades earlier were common
practice in the field of obstetrics. Hungarian doctor published a
paper about seal 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

(05:52):
that time that people have started to realize what a
groundbreaker he was. You can learn more about Ignace, cevial
Vice and the other doctors we're making similar strides at
about the same time in the March episode of stuff
you missed in History class called Ignat semil Vice and
the War on hand Washing. You can subscribe to this
day in History class on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, and

(06:14):
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.