Why Did Doctors Refuse to Wash Their Hands?

#medicine #handwashing #history In eighteen forty six, a woman arriving at the Vienna General Hospital to give birth would ask what day of the week it was before she went in. The answer decided which of two maternity wards she was put in. In one of them, roughly one mother in six died. In the other, about one in fifty. Same building, same front door, same women, sorted by nothing but the day. A Hungarian obstetrician worked out why. He ordered every doctor entering the delivery room to scrub in chlorinated lime, and the death rate in his ward fell from eighteen point three percent to two point two in two months. It stayed down. Then it was repeated in a second hospital, in a different city, with the same result. He was refused for the rest of his life, and the reason is not the one everybody gives. Nobody knew germs existed, which is true and is not the answer, because he never asked anyone to believe in germs. He asked them to read a column of numbers and wash their hands. This is what actually happened: what his critics were right about, how much of the damage he did to himself, and why the story does not end in the nineteenth century. Time stamps: 0:00 Two Wards, One Hospital 2:38 The Accident That Gave It Away 5:36 Why They Said No 8:07 Known, Proven, Still Not Done ————————————————————— 👁️ wash your hands, like the video and subscribe) ————————————————————— SOURCES: Ignaz Semmelweis, Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers (1861). His own account of the two clinics, the chlorine washing rule and the mortality figures before and after it. K. Codell Carter and Barbara R. Carter, Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis. The Kolletschka autopsy injury, the Pest results, the open letters, and the slow reversal by his critics. Sherwin B. Nuland, The Doctors' Plague. His dismissal from Vienna, his character, and the disputed circumstances of his death in eighteen sixty five. M. Best and D. Neuhauser, Ignaz Semmelweis and the birth of infection control, Quality and Safety in Health Care (2004). Why the evidence was contested at the time and what the objections to it actually were. World Health Organization, WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care (2009). The historical section on Semmelweis, and modern observed compliance rates in hospitals.