Life-Saving Power of Handwashing

Washing hands is a common hygiene practice today, but it was not always the case, even for doctors. In the mid-19th century, more than 5% of women would die during labor in maternity hospitals, which was ten times higher than deliveries performed by midwives. The cause was almost always an infection called childbed fever.

Medical students and their professors at the elite teaching hospitals of this era typically began their day performing barehanded autopsies on the women who had died the day before of childbed fever. They then proceeded to the wards to examine the laboring women about to deliver their babies, frequently and unknowingly passing the childbed fever to them. It was so prevalent that many expectant mothers of the era called the doctor’s plague.

In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor working in Vienna, noticed a high mortality rate from childbed fever. He decided to implement a policy that required doctors and medical students to wash their hands with a chlorine solution before examining pregnant women. Semmelweis based this practice on his observation that chlorine was effective in removing the putrid smell of dissected bodies and he hoped it would also remove the particles that caused childbed fever. The results of this new policy were immediate and staggering: the mortality rate in Semmelweis' maternity clinic dropped by 90%.

Despite the success of his handwashing policy, Semmelweis faced resistance and skepticism from much of the medical community. His insistence on handwashing was ahead of its time, predating the germ theory of disease by several decades. Unfortunately, Semmelweis was ostracized by his peers and died in an asylum at the age of 47, before his contributions to medical science were recognized. His story is a reminder that sometimes you need to go against the status quo to have a dramatic impact.

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