It's mid-1800s and a group of doctors surround
a table which has splayed on it an opened cadaver. An audience of men of science watch in awe
as those doctors remove organs from the body and try to explain the cause of death. This is a new age, a new era, but while some
of those men are legends in their own right, they’re still pretty ignorant. Here’s why. After the discectomy a man rushes in and tells
those doctors that they should wash their hands before returning to their hospitals. It could save lives, he says. “This is preposterous!” barks one doctor,
“Why in God’s name would one wash their hands…get out of here you deluded imbecile.” Welcome to the sad, wonderful and wacky world
of how hand-washing got started. You see, at the time, those doctors were in
fact about to change the world. They were champions in an era which could
be called the medical enlightenment. This was the time that surgeons were understanding
the human body much better than ever before, when illness and disease was no longer being
blamed on a person having a “demonic sensibility”. Opening up bodies was nothing new. In fact, in the 17th century the Company of
Surgeons in London would often dissect convicted murders in public…after they’d been hanged
of course. London wasn’t quite Westeros, although body-snatching
was all the rage because those doctors and surgeons needed more training. These surgeons were like Kings at around the
time of the 1850s. Dissection was nothing new, but in London
and all over Europe medical men were not just seeing how the body worked, but they were
now heading into the world of “pathological anatomy”, meaning dissecting as a way of
finding the cause of death. So now imagine that one day some of the leading
surgeons in the world are doing their thing and in walks a man that tells them to wash
their hands. They think this guy is tripping, to use today’s
parlance, and laugh him out of the hospital. This guy wasn’t tripping at all, and in
fact, we can thank him for changing the world. We can thank him for saving countless lives,
and that’s why he is sometimes called “The Savior of Mothers.” It was the doctors who were ignorant and deluded. We also bet that most of you guys have never
even heard of this hero, how he changed the world, but how he died so savagely. We guarantee you, this is one of the best
stories you've never heard. The man we are talking about was one Ignaz
Semmelweis and he was born on 1 July 1818 in what is now today’s Budapest, the capital
city of Hungary. He got himself a medical degree and then focused
on a branch of medicine called obstetrics. If you don’t know what that is, it’s concerned
with childbirth. Ah ok, so this guy wasn’t one of those heroic
surgeons, you are thinking. The answer is no. Semmelweis actually went to work as an assistant
professor at The First Obstetrical Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital. This was the year 1846, and the city of Vienna
was a center of science and art. At the time a lot of poor women or prostitutes
were getting pregnant and then killing the baby. This is known as infanticide, and was quite
common back then. This clinic where our good doctor worked would
actually take in pregnant women and even help bring up the child. This was the deal. The hospital said, hey, come have your child
here. Our new doctors and nurses can learn a thing
or two, and you get free childcare. You have to also remember that a lot of women
died during childbirth back then. Those doctors and midwives really needed that
training. But Semmelweis soon started noticing something
really weird. There was a First and Second Clinic at the
hospital, and Semmelweis saw that way more women died after giving birth at the First
Clinic. In fact, everyone knew this…the women would
beg to be sent to the Second Clinic. Some of them even gave birth outside the hospital
and then pretended that they’d accidentally had the child on the way to the hospital. That way they could still get free childcare. Other women actually got on their knees and
pleaded with the doctors not to send them to that deadly first clinic. The place was a veritable death trap, and
Semmelweis and the women knew this only too well. You see, those women who died after giving
birth were dying of something called puerperal fever, aka childbed fever. That’s a fever a woman gets because of a
uterine infection after giving birth. What really shocked Semmelweis is that more
women in the First Clinic were getting this than those giving birth in the streets. Surely the clinic must be a safer environment,
he thought. The man then started looking at the data. He saw that some of the wards were staffed
by midwives, some by medical students, and some by trained doctors. Guess, what? Way more women died that had been treated
by the most educated people, the doctors. Women were five times less likely to get the
deadly fever if their baby was delivered by a midwife. “What is this deformity of reason,” wondered
Semmelweis, and so he started doing some rounds at the wards. He noticed one major difference, and that
was that at the midwives’ wards the women had their kids on their side, and in the doctors’
clinic they gave birth on their backs. Ok, thought Semmelweis, it’s just a matter
of angles. He ordered that all women now give birth on
their sides. Did it work? No, they still kept dying at the same rate
at the doctor’s clinic. He was lost for an explanation, but then he
saw that after a woman died in the First Clinic a priest would walk up and down the wards
ringing a bell. For what reason, we don’t know, but Semmelweis
wondered if the sound of a death bell stressed the women, and this somehow made them sick. He stopped the bell-ringing for a while. This of course was a long shot, and it didn’t
work. Semmelweis became so frustrated by all of
this, that he actually took a bit of time off and got some fresh air in the Austrian
countryside. Still, it bugged him every day…why were
all those women dying in that one clinic. IT JUST MADE NO SENSE! Then when he got back to the hospital he received
more bad news. His friend, a pathologist, had just died. He’d been doing an autopsy on a woman who'd
died from childbed fever. He’d pricked his finger during that autopsy
and his blood had mixed with hers. He subsequently got a fever and later died. Semmelweis then noticed something, his friend
the pathologist had had the same symptoms as someone with childbed fever. It was a bit of a Eureka moment. He knew that the fever wasn’t just something
that pregnant women could get, but it was some kind of thing that could be spread. Then he had his second eureka moment. He realized that the doctors at the First
Clinic did a lot of autopsies, but the midwives at the Second Clinic didn’t. He thought about his dead pathologist friend
and started connecting the dots.... This disease, he hypothesized, can be carried
from one person to another. This may all seem very elementary to you guys
watching, but you have to remember that germ science wasn’t invented yet. Physicians had for years written theories
about how diseases were spread, but microorganisms and pathogens were not understood. Semmelweis considered that in some of those
cadavers that were being dissected there were small particles of disease. After digging around, a doctor would transfer
that disease with his own hands to a pregnant woman. Particles from the corpses’ blood was getting
into the woman’s blood and then she died, infected from a dead person with the vector
being the good but ignorant doctor. Semmelweis then told everyone to wash their
hands with soap and water, and after that chlorine solution. The latter is actually an amazing disinfectant,
but Semmelweis didn’t know that because he didn’t really understand germs. He just told them to use it ‘cos it cleared
up the smell of corpses on doctors’ hands. What happened next of course was that suddenly
lots of women were not getting the fever at the First Clinic. Hand-washing was a success. Women no longer begged to be taken to the
Second Clinic or secretly had their babies in the streets. Semmelweis told the medical community at large. He said, guys, you know what, washing hands
saves lives. I have the data to prove this. It’s incontestable. You guys doing autopsies are spreading disease
around. In fact, everyone should start washing their
hands. It somehow stops diseases spreading. They thought he was mad, and being the kings
of the medical community, some of the leading surgeons totally dismissed Semmelweis’s
idea. “What,” some surgeons thought, “You
are saying we, the life-savers, the frontline of medical science, are actually killing people.” “Ugh…yes,” said Semmelweis…” Please wash your hands.” He made a lot of enemies. Semmelweis was right, but he was also quite
obsessed. He ranted and raved about washing hands. He shouted from the rooftops, and the higher
ups in the medical community didn’t like it. They didn’t much like him. Here was an upstart trying to say doctors
killed their patients because they carried invisible monsters on their hands. Was that science or witchcraft!? He actually got fired from the hospital, and
yes, of course pregnant women started dying again. That’s because doctors stopped washing their
hands. Semmelweis was smeared and called a loon. They did a number on him, berated him, as
if he was some crazy charlatan spreading misinformation. Science was about facts, they said, observable
facts, not tiny invisible particles travelling from dead bodies to pregnant women via a doctor. Semmelweis found it hard to get a job after
that. They ruined him, and he was way ahead of all
of them. He didn’t give up at first, though. He left Austria and travelled around Europe,
telling medical professionals that if they started washing their hands then disease would
spread less easily. No one believed him, or not many people...a
few british scientists were actually on his side. Semmelweis knew that he could save lives,
but hardly anyone was listening. We should say that some younger students and
medical men did take notice of Semmelweis and try his disinfecting methods, but the
old guard of science would not listen. They controlled the gates to change, and they
weren’t about to let a relatively unknown Hungarian man inside the highest of castles. Semmelweis ended up working back in Hungary
and he actually saved tons of lives at a hospital called St. Rochus, and that was because during
an outbreak he made people wash their hands. Well, he made them wash their hands all the
time. The hospital mortality rate greatly improved
after Semmelweis turned up armed with data and facts about soap and chlorine and the
spread of disease. He was then given the post of Professor of
obstetrics at the University of Pest, but you know what, those so-called leaders of
science in Vienna still rejected him. Some of them even went as far as to say that
Semmelweis talked utter nonsense. He didn’t give up, though, and wrote a book
“The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever”. This showed how his disinfecting regimes had
saved lives already and could save millions more. The book was rejected by the medical community. When he gave talks around Europe he was virtually
booed off-stage by the grey-bearded dinosaurs of medicine. We should say here that at this time Semmelweis
was relatively young for someone making breakthroughs. He was only in his mid-forties. He got angrier and angrier and then one day
he just cracked. This might have been brought on by syphilis,
but we don’t know, it could have been stress. There are mixed opinions, but it’s likely
he had a mental breakdown due to being roundly rejected and knowing he could save so many
people. At the age of 47 he was committed to a mental
asylum and died just a few months later. How he died is not so clear. It seems he had a wound on his hand and that
wound got infected. This led to sepsis and then death. The reason he got that wound, though, is quite
upsetting seeing what his great man had achieved. You see, he was actually lured to the mental
asylum by a famous Austrian physician named Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra. He told Semmelweis that he wanted to take
him there to see a patient. Once Semmelweis realized there was no patient
and he had fallen for a trap, he tried to escape. The guards put him in a straight-jacket and
subsequently beat him quite badly. He was thrown into a dark cell, occasionally
doused in cold water, and that wound on his hand festered until his blood was poisoned. Two decades after Semmelweis died, Louis Pasteur,
the famous French biologist and microbiologist, would confirm that Semmelweis was indeed right. Pasteur proved that infectious particles spread
disease and certainly that of childbed fever. His experiments in Germ Theory, that of pathogens
spreading disease, were groundbreaking, and they proved that Semmelweis had been right
all along. British scientist, Joseph Lister, who’s
now called the “Father of Antiseptic Medicine”, some years later said Semmelweis should be
hailed as a hero. Finally, medical science believed him. Lister wrote, “I think with the greatest
admiration of him and his achievement and it fills me with joy that at last he is given
the respect due to him.” Sometimes the old guard just reject new, groundbreaking
ideas, and that still happens today. But there’s a happy ending to this story,
because when that happens and it turns out the larger intellectual community is wrong,
we have a term for what they suffered from. That term is the “Semmelweis reflex.” For more things you should be scared of go
watch, “Diseases That Will Kill You The Quickest.” Or if that’s not to your liking, take a
look at this….
