Thinkers Timeline

Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) was a Hungarian physician working in Vienna. He was born in Buda, in what is now Budapest, and studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he became a senior assistant in the maternity ward of the Vienna General Hospital. There he confronted one of the most disturbing puzzles in medicine: women giving birth in the First Maternity Division of the hospital, which was staffed by medical students and doctors, died of childbed fever at a rate of about ten percent, sometimes much higher. Women giving birth in the Second Division, staffed by midwives, died at a rate of about four percent. Women who gave birth in the street before reaching the hospital had even lower mortality. Semmelweis spent years trying to understand why. In 1847, after the death of his colleague and friend Jakob Kolletschka from a wound infection during an autopsy, he made the connection: childbed fever was caused by cadaverous particles, infectious matter from corpses, carried from the autopsy room to the maternity ward on the hands of doctors and students who had been dissecting bodies. He introduced mandatory handwashing with a chlorinated lime solution and mortality in his ward fell dramatically. He never received the recognition his discovery deserved in his lifetime and was eventually committed to a mental institution, where he died at forty-seven, possibly from the same kind of infection his work had shown how to prevent.