The Doctor Who Was Right Too Early

In the 1840s, a woman who gave birth in some hospitals was in more danger than a soldier in battle. The killer was childbed fever, an infection that swept through maternity wards. A Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis found a way to stop it. For doing so, he was ridiculed, and he died in an asylum.

A puzzle in two wards

Semmelweis worked at the Vienna General Hospital, which had two maternity clinics. In the first, staffed by doctors and medical students, mortality from childbed fever was often around ten percent or more. In the second, run by midwives, it was much lower. Women knew it, and some begged to be admitted to the second ward or gave birth in the street.

The discovery

A colleague’s death after a scalpel wound, with symptoms like childbed fever, led Semmelweis to a hypothesis. Doctors were coming from the autopsy room to the delivery ward, carrying “cadaverous particles” on their hands. In May 1847 he ordered everyone to wash with a chlorinated lime solution. Deaths fell sharply, to rates similar to the midwives’ ward.

The rejection

Many physicians refused to accept it. Germ theory had not yet been established, so he had no mechanism to offer. His claim also implied that doctors themselves were killing patients, which was hard to accept. Semmelweis, who was blunt and increasingly angry, wrote furious open letters. He lost his position, and in 1865 he was committed to an asylum, dying there days later from an infected wound. Only after the work of Pasteur and Lister did his findings gain acceptance.

Editorial assessment

The story is often told as a simple tale of a genius ignored. More accurately, it shows how knowledge needs both evidence and persuasion, and how a profession can reject a correct claim when it threatens its sense of itself. The most useful lesson may be for the present: when a result is uncomfortable for those in authority, we should check whether we are rejecting the evidence, or the implication.