Nataliia Bohdanova

Itis hard to imagine that there was a time when people had no idea where diseases came from. Even after Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered “tiny animals” — bacteria and microorganisms — in the plaque of a human tooth, the connection between these creatures and illnesses remained unclear for many years.

Every day, sepsis claims the lives of approximately 1,400 people worldwide. Often, it develops as a result of hospital-acquired infections, known as nosocomial infections. These infections are the most common complications among hospitalized patients, affecting 5–10% of individuals in emergency care wards.

Let me tell you a remarkable story about how one of today’s most ordinary practices became a groundbreaking revelation in medicine.

The story begins in 1844 when a young physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, graduated from the University of Vienna and started working as an assistant to Dr. Klein at the Vienna General Hospital, Allgemeine Krankenhaus. The hospital had two maternity wards. In one, the maternal mortality rate was around 4%, while in the other, it was as high as 20%, sometimes rising to 50% during the summer months. The second ward had such a terrible reputation that women avoided it at all costs, often opting to give birth at home or even in the streets to escape the dreaded “house of death.” The reason for this stark contrast remained a mystery, as both wards followed the same procedures.

However, everything changed in 1847, following the tragic death of Semmelweis’s close friend, Dr. Jakob Kolletschka, who died from an infection caused by a scalpel wound he sustained during an autopsy. Semmelweis noticed that his friend’s symptoms closely resembled those of puerperal fever, which was killing women in the “house of death.” He also observed that in this ward, deliveries were performed by doctors and medical students who had come directly from autopsies, potentially carrying “cadaveric particles” on their hands. By contrast, the first ward was staffed by midwives who did not perform dissections, and the mortality rate there was much lower — around 2%.

Semmelweis hypothesized that these “cadaveric particles” were the cause of the fever. He introduced a radical solution for the time: washing hands with a chlorinated lime solution before each examination. This simple measure produced astonishing results: mortality in the “house of death” dropped to 1–2%, even lower than in the first ward.

However, his proposal met with resistance from colleagues. Many doctors argued that washing hands was too laborious and impractical. There was also a prevailing belief that physicians, being blessed by God, could not be carriers of disease. Semmelweis’s assertion that doctors themselves were the cause of deaths provoked anger and ridicule. His findings were based on observations, but scientific evidence at the time was limited.

The crux of the matter was that Semmelweis’s theory dealt a severe blow to the authority of the entire medical community. It suggested that doctors themselves were the cause of these deaths, sending hundreds of thousands of women and their newborn children to early graves. Physicians around the world continued to infect their patients with unwashed hands, stubbornly refusing to adopt antiseptic practices out of sheer principle.

Such misunderstandings were not uncommon in the history of medicine. In 1843, American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested that puerperal fever was contagious and transmitted by doctors. He even proposed extreme measures such as burning contaminated clothing and instruments and temporarily halting medical practice. Yet, his ideas were met with criticism, and opponents, such as Charles D. Meigs, famously claimed, “Gentlemen’s hands are clean.”

Despite the dramatic success of his measures, Semmelweis’s discoveries remained unacknowledged for decades until Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Joseph Lister provided conclusive evidence for the germ theory of disease and antiseptic methods.

August 13 marks the tragic death — or perhaps even the murder — of Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865), the renowned Hungarian physician known as the “Savior of Mothers.” His life ended as a result of beatings inflicted by the staff of a psychiatric institution where he had been forcibly committed.