Ignaz Semmelweis
Hand Washing Saves Lives
Lived 1818 to 1865The story of Ignaz Semmelweis is tragic on a number of levels.
Firstly, there are the women who died who shouldn’t have.
In 1847 Semmelweis, who was an obstetrician, (a doctor specializing in childbirth), published evidence that when doctors washed their hands before examining or treating patients, the mortality rate for women in his birthing ward in Vienna, Austria, was greatly reduced.
In his hospital, doctors routinely examined diseased corpses in the mortuary, then attended women in childbirth without first washing their hands. In some months as many as a third of the women in the birthing part of the hospital were dying!
Semmelweis could not explain why hand-washing was effective – he didn’t know about germs – he just saw that it worked and that patients no longer caught fevers and other diseases.
The second tragedy is that although Semmelweis cut death rates in his own hospital, his attempts to spread the word failed. Many people died because hand-washing was not made a routine part of hospital practice.
The third tragic part of the story took place in 1865. Semmelweis had become clinically depressed when his work was rejected and he started behaving oddly. He was lured by another doctor into an insane asylum in Vienna. Realizing it was a trap, Semmelweis tried to get out, but was held and badly beaten by guards and placed in a straightjacket. He died two weeks later, most likely from injuries he suffered during the beating.
With Semmelweis gone, the fourth tragedy is that his hospital went back to running ‘properly’ again, discarding his ‘crazy’ ideas. Mortality rates increased by a factor of six, but nobody cared.
Alfred Wegener
Continental Drift
Lived 1880 to 1930Alfred Wegener proposed that Earth’s continents move very slowly. Over millions of years they can move a long way. Between 1912 and 1929 he published a stream of fossil and rock evidence to support his theory. He died on an expedition to Greenland in 1930.
Wegener’s theory of continental drift was rejected by most other scientists during his lifetime. It was only in the 1960s that continental drift finally became part of mainstream science.
