Please check your inbox to confirm.Watch the new series, starting Sunday, July 26 at 10:30 p.m. EasternOn this date in 1850, a prickly Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis stepped up to the podium of the Vienna Medical Society’s lecture hall. Others believe he developed blood poisoning and sepsis while imprisoned in the asylum for what may have been an unbridled case of bipolar disease. The evening of May 15 would hardly be different — even if those present (and many more who merely read about it) did not acknowledge Semmelweis’s marvelous discovery for several decades.Ignaz Semmelweis, circa 1860. More recently, some have claimed that the obstetrician had an early variant of Alzheimer’s disease and was beaten to death in the asylum by his keepers.Semmelweis’s professional timing could not have been worse. More famously, in 1843 Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Harvard anatomist and self-proclaimed “autocrat of the breakfast table,” published “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” in which he discerned that the disease was spread by physicians and recommended that actively practicing obstetricians abstain from performing autopsies on women who died of puerperal fever as one of their “paramount obligations to society.”That said, it was Dr. Semmelweis who ordered his medical students and junior physicians to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution until the smell of the putrid bodies they dissected in the autopsy suite was no longer detectable.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says Over the years, Semmelweis got angrier and eventually even strange. Such outbursts, no matter how well deserved, never go unnoticed, let alone unpunished, in the staid halls of academic medicine.Becoming more shrill and angry at each detractor’s critique, Semmelweis lost his clinical appointment at the Vienna General Hospital and in 1850 abruptly left for his native Budapest without even telling his closest colleagues. Semmelweis wanted to figure out why so many women in maternity wards were dying from He studied two maternity wards in the hospital.
Semmelweis’s behavior became more and more erratic and he was finally committed to an insane asylum on July 30, 1865. Historians still argue over what caused Semmelweis’s mental health breakdown and subsequent death.
Dr. Semmelweis paid a heavy price as he devoted his short, troubled life to pushing the boundaries of knowledge in the noble quest to save lives.On the 165th anniversary of publicly announcing his landmark medical discovery, it seems fitting that we pay grand tribute to the great Dr. Semmelweis. by Tibi … Surprisingly, physicians did not begin to acknowledge the lifesaving power of this simple act until 1847It was then that Dr. Semmelweis began exhorting his fellow physicians at the famed Vienna General Hospital (Allgemeines Krankenhaus) to wash up before examining women about to deliver babies. 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 looked instead to anatomy. This was a revelation: Childbed fever wasn't something only women in childbirth got sick from. Consequently, Semmelweis met with enormous resistance and criticism.A remarkably difficult man, Semmelweis refused to publish his ”self-evident” findings until 13 years after making them despite being urged to do so repeatedly by those who supported him. Lessler says, "It had no effect. Please check your inbox to confirm.Additional Support Provided By: He died there, two weeks later, on Aug. 13, 1865, at the age of 47. He took a leave from his hospital duties and traveled to Venice. "The year was 1846, and our would-be hero was a Hungarian doctor named Semmelweis was a man of his time, according to It was a time Lessler describes as "the start of the golden age of the physician scientist," when physicians were expected to have scientific training.So doctors like Semmelweis were no longer thinking of illness as an imbalance caused by bad air or evil spirits. Semmelweis was brilliant but had two strikes against him when applying for a position at the Vienna General Hospital in 1846: he was Hungarian and Jewish. He publicly berated people who disagreed with him and made some influential enemies.Eventually the doctors gave up the chlorine hand-washing, and Semmelweis — he lost his job.Semmelweis kept trying to convince doctors in other parts of Europe to wash with chlorine, but no one would listen to him.Even today, convincing health care providers to take hand-washing seriously is a challenge. JAD ABUMRAD: Okay.