The Story of Ignaz Semmelweis, The Physician and Scientist That Was Ridiculed For Washing His Hands.
- Apr 18, 2020
- 4 min read
In the mid-19th century, thousands of women across Europe died after giving birth. Doctors explained these deaths with the popular “miasma theory” – the belief that invisible clouds of “poison air” spread through hospital wards, killing patients at random.
But one Hungarian obstetrician wasn’t convinced. Ignaz Semmelweis, now remembered as the “saviour of mothers,” discovered that something as simple as washing hands could all but eliminate childbed fever. Tragically, his discovery was ridiculed in his lifetime.
Early Life and Education
Ignaz Semmelweis was born on 1 July 1818, in Buda, near modern Budapest. His father was a prosperous grocer, and the young Ignaz was first sent to study law at the University of Vienna in 1837. Within a year, he shifted to medicine, eventually earning his doctorate in 1844. Drawn to obstetrics, he began work in 1846 as an assistant in the maternity wards of Vienna General Hospital.
A Deadly Divide in the Hospital
The hospital had two maternity wards. Ward No. 1, staffed by doctors and medical students, had an appalling reputation: women admitted there were far more likely to die of puerperal fever (childbed fever). In Semmelweis’s very first month, 36 out of 208 women died, a shocking 17% fatality rate. Ward No. 2, staffed only by midwives, had far fewer deaths.
Poor women in Vienna avoided Ward No. 1 if they could. Some even chose to give birth on the streets, where their chances of survival were higher.
Challenging the “Miasma Theory”
The accepted explanation was miasma, a deadly gas or “poison air.” But Semmelweis refused to accept that a mysterious vapour would target one ward while sparing another just down the corridor. He began to suspect the doctors themselves.
Ward No. 1’s staff frequently carried out autopsies in the morning before delivering babies in the afternoon, often without washing their hands. Midwives, by contrast, never performed autopsies.
The breakthrough came in 1847, when Semmelweis’s colleague Jakob Kolletschka died after cutting himself during an autopsy. His symptoms mirrored those of the women who had died in childbirth. To Semmelweis, the link was obvious: infection was being carried from corpses to mothers by unwashed hands and instruments.
Handwashing Saves Lives
Semmelweis ordered doctors and students to wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution before examining patients. The results were dramatic. In just months, mortality rates in Ward No. 1 plummeted. By 1849, deaths from puerperal fever had almost disappeared.
For the first time in medical history, maternal death in childbirth could be drastically reduced.
Hostility from the Medical Establishment
Despite the clear evidence, Semmelweis’s findings were not welcomed. Senior doctors in Vienna attacked his ideas, insisting that disease could not possibly be spread by gentlemen physicians. His statistics, though compelling, challenged centuries of medical tradition.
By 1849, Semmelweis was dismissed from his post. Mortality rates in Ward No. 1 quickly returned to their previous levels as doctors abandoned handwashing.
Later Career in Budapest
Semmelweis returned to Hungary, working at the St. Rochus Hospital in Budapest. There, his methods again saved lives: maternal mortality fell sharply when handwashing was enforced.
In 1861, he published his major work Die Aetiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers (The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever). Dense with statistics and difficult to read, the book was mocked by many leading physicians. The medical profession clung to older theories of disease for decades, dismissing his insistence on cleanliness.
Decline and Death
Years of rejection weighed heavily on Semmelweis. He suffered from depression and, by the mid-1860s, symptoms of what may have been early dementia. In 1865, he was tricked into entering an asylum. There he was beaten, restrained, and suffered infected injuries. Within two weeks, Ignaz Semmelweis was dead, aged just 47.
Only a handful of people attended his funeral.
Legacy and Recognition
Semmelweis’s ideas were vindicated decades later, as antiseptic techniques championed by Joseph Lister and the germ theory of Louis Pasteur became universally accepted. Today, hand hygiene is considered one of the most basic and essential practices in medicine.
Though dismissed in life, Semmelweis is now honoured as a pioneer. His body was reburied in Budapest in 1891, and statues commemorate him around the world.
He is remembered not for discovering a new drug or performing groundbreaking surgery, but for proving that the simplest action, washing your hands, can save countless lives.
Conclusion
Ignaz Semmelweis transformed medicine, but at a terrible personal cost. By challenging entrenched beliefs, he revealed how arrogance and prejudice in the medical profession delayed lifesaving practices for decades. His story is a reminder that science advances not only through discovery, but through the courage to question authority.
Sources
Semmelweis, Ignaz. Die Aetiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers (Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever). Vienna: C.A. Hartleben, 1861. (Original publication of his findings)
Margotta, Roberto. History of Medicine. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968.
Nuland, Sherwin B. The Doctors’ Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.
Hanninen, Osmo, Farley, John, and Hanninen, J. “Ignaz Semmelweis: An Annotated Bibliography.” Medical History, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1994): 79–90.
Carter, K. Codell. Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis. Greenwood Press, 1983.
Loudon, Irvine. “Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis’ Studies of Death in Childbed.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 87, no. 12 (1994): 731–734.
BBC History. “Ignaz Semmelweis.” Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/semmelweis_ignaz.shtml
The Science Museum, London. “Ignaz Semmelweis and the story of handwashing.” Available at: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/ignaz-semmelweis
Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Ignaz Semmelweis.” Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ignaz-Semmelweis
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