Famous in STEM
Ignaz Semmelweis
The doctor who found the killer on his own hands
Lived: 1818–1865
Big idea: Doctors were carrying death from the autopsy room to the maternity ward on their hands. Washing them cut the deaths sharply.
In the spring of 1847, a young Hungarian doctor came back from a vacation in Venice to the Vienna General Hospital and learned that his friend was dead. Jakob Kolletschka, a professor of forensic medicine, had been performing an autopsy when a student’s scalpel slipped and cut his finger. The infection spread up his arm, and then to the linings of his chest, his belly and his brain. He died of it.
Ignaz Semmelweis read the autopsy report on his friend and went cold. He knew those findings. He saw them several times a week on the bodies of young mothers from his own ward, women who had given birth, developed a raging fever within days and died of childbed fever. Kolletschka had never given birth. What he had in common with the mothers was a wound, and something from a corpse that had gotten into it.
Two doors, two death rates
The maternity hospital in Vienna was one of the biggest in the world, and it had two clinics side by side. The first was run by doctors and medical students, the second by midwives. Women were sent to one or the other depending on the day they arrived. In the doctors’ clinic, in a bad month, nearly one mother in five died of childbed fever. In the midwives’ clinic, next door, with the same food and the same air, it was usually around one in thirty.
Women begged on their knees to be admitted to the second clinic. Some gave birth in the street on the way to the hospital rather than go through the first door, and those women, Semmelweis noticed, hardly ever got the fever at all.
The chapter goes on. So do 19 more.
