59 Facts About Ignaz Semmelweis

Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect their hands.

Ignaz Semmelweis could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it.

In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Ignaz Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues.

Ignaz Semmelweis's findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, giving Semmelweis' observations a theoretical explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur's research, practised and operated using hygienic methods with great success.

Ignaz Semmelweis was born on 1 July 1818 in the Taban neighbourhood of Buda, Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire.

Ignaz Semmelweis was the fifth child out of 10 of the prosperous grocer family of Jozsef Semmelweis and Terez Muller.

Jozsef Ignaz Semmelweis was granted citizenship in Buda in 1806 and, in the same year, he opened a wholesale business for spices and general consumer goods.

Ignaz Semmelweis began studying law at the University of Vienna in the autumn of 1837, but switched to medicine.

Ignaz Semmelweis was awarded his doctor of medicine degree in 1844.

Ignaz Semmelweis's teachers included Carl von Rokitansky, Joseph Skoda, and Ferdinand von Hebra.

Ignaz Semmelweis was appointed assistant to Professor Johann Klein in the First Obstetrical Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital on 1 July 1846.

Ignaz Semmelweis described desperate women begging on their knees not to be admitted to the First Clinic.

Ignaz Semmelweis was puzzled that puerperal fever was rare among women giving street births, prompting his curiosity as to what protected those who delivered outside the clinic.

Troubled by the mortality discrepancy between the two clinics, Ignaz Semmelweis searched for differences.

Ignaz Semmelweis excluded overcrowding as a cause since the Second Clinic was always more crowded.

Ignaz Semmelweis eliminated climate because the two clinics were in close geographical proximity to each other.

Ignaz Semmelweis altered the position in which mothers gave birth and proposed that priests giving last rites in the clinic was terrifying women after birth causing them to develop the fever.

Ignaz Semmelweis' breakthrough occurred in 1847, following the death of his good friend Jakob Kolletschka, who had been accidentally poked with a student's scalpel while performing a post mortem examination.

Ignaz Semmelweis immediately proposed a connection between cadaveric contamination and puerperal fever.

Ignaz Semmelweis proposed that he and the medical students carried "cadaverous particles" on their hands from the autopsy room to the patients they examined in the First Obstetrical Clinic.

Ignaz Semmelweis instituted a policy of using a solution of chlorinated lime for washing hands between autopsy work and the examination of patients.

Ignaz Semmelweis did this because he found that this chlorinated solution worked best to remove the putrid smell of infected autopsy tissue, and thus perhaps destroyed the causal "poisonous" or contaminating "cadaveric" agent hypothetically being transmitted by this material.

Ignaz Semmelweis was dismissed from the hospital for political reasons and harassed by the medical community in Vienna, being eventually forced to move to Budapest.

Ignaz Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of the medical profession and began writing open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times denouncing them as irresponsible murderers.

Ignaz Semmelweis's contemporaries, including his wife, believed he was losing his mind, and in 1865, nearly 20 years after his breakthrough, he was committed to the Landesirrenanstalt Dobling.

Ignaz Semmelweis died there of septic shock only 14 days later, possibly as the result of being severely beaten by guards.

Ignaz Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death when Louis Pasteur further developed the germ theory of disease, offering a theoretical explanation for Ignaz Semmelweis's findings.

Ignaz Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time.

Hebra claimed that Ignaz Semmelweis's work had a practical significance comparable to that of Edward Jenner's introduction of cowpox inoculations to prevent smallpox.

Additionally, initial responses to Ignaz Semmelweis's findings tended to downplay their significance by arguing that he had said nothing new.

James Young Simpson, for instance, saw no difference between Ignaz Semmelweis's groundbreaking findings and the idea presented in an 1843 paper by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Ignaz Semmelweis was warning against all decaying organic matter, not just against a specific contagion that originated from victims of childbed fever themselves.

Some accounts emphasize that Ignaz Semmelweis refused to communicate his method officially to the learned circles of Vienna, nor was he eager to explain it on paper.

Some of his brothers were punished for active participation in the Hungarian independence movement, and the Hungarian-born Ignaz Semmelweis likely was sympathetic to the cause.

Ignaz Semmelweis's superior, professor Johann Klein, was a conservative Austrian, likely uneasy with the independence movements and alarmed by the other revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg areas.

When Ignaz Semmelweis's term was about to expire, Carl Braun applied for the position of "assistant" in the First Clinic, possibly at Klein's own invitation.

Ignaz Semmelweis was obliged to leave the obstetrical clinic when his term expired on 20 March 1849.

The day his term expired, Ignaz Semmelweis petitioned the Viennese authorities to be made docent of obstetrics.

At first, because of Klein's opposition, Ignaz Semmelweis's petition was denied.

Ignaz Semmelweis reapplied, but had to wait until 10 October 1850, before finally being appointed docent of 'theoretical' obstetrics.

Ignaz Semmelweis apparently left without so much as saying goodbye to his former friends and colleagues, a move that might have offended them.

Ignaz Semmelweis, upon arriving from the Habsburg Vienna in 1850, likely was not warmly welcomed in Pest.

On 20 May 1851, Ignaz Semmelweis took the relatively insignificant, unpaid, honorary head-physician position of the obstetric ward of Pest's small Szent Rokus Hospital.

Ignaz Semmelweis held that position for six years, until June 1857.

Childbed fever was rampant at the clinic; at a visit in 1850, just after returning to Pest, Ignaz Semmelweis found one fresh corpse, another patient in severe agony, and four others seriously ill with the disease.

Ignaz Semmelweis continued to believe that puerperal fever was due to uncleanliness of the bowel.

Ignaz Semmelweis was eventually appointed in 1855, but only because the Viennese authorities overruled the wishes of the Hungarians, as Braun did not speak Hungarian.

Ignaz Semmelweis declined an offer in 1857 to become professor of obstetrics at the University of Zurich.

Ignaz Semmelweis's views were much more favorably received in the United Kingdom than on the continent, but he was more often cited than understood.

The British consistently regarded Ignaz Semmelweis as having supported their theory of contagion.

Simpson surmised that the British obstetrical literature must be totally unknown in Vienna, or Ignaz Semmelweis would have known that the British had long regarded childbed fever as contagious and would have employed chlorine washing to protect against it.

Two years later, Ignaz Semmelweis published his own account of his work in an essay entitled "The Etiology of Childbed Fever".

In 1861, Ignaz Semmelweis published his main work Die Atiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers.

Breisky objected that Ignaz Semmelweis had not proved that puerperal fever and pyemia are identical, and he insisted that other factors beyond decaying organic matter certainly had to be included in the etiology of the disease.

Carl Edvard Marius Levy, head of the Copenhagen maternity hospital and an outspoken critic of Ignaz Semmelweis's ideas, had reservations concerning the unspecific nature of cadaverous particles and that the supposed quantities were unreasonably small.

On 13 July 1865, the Ignaz Semmelweis family visited friends, and during the visit, Ignaz Semmelweis's behavior seemed particularly inappropriate.

Ignaz Semmelweis's alleged affliction has been a subject of some debate.

Ignaz Semmelweis was severely beaten by several guards, secured in a straitjacket, and confined to a darkened cell.

Ignaz Semmelweis died after two weeks, on 13 August 1865, aged 47, from a gangrenous wound, due to an infection on his right hand which might have been caused by the struggle.