Ignaz Semmelweis

Chronicled events

1. May 1847​·​Death on the Doctors’ Hands
   #5769

   Childbed fever comes from particles of corpses, which doctors and students carry on their hands from the dissecting room to the mothers they examine. Wash them off in chlorinated lime, and the fever goes.

   #5770

   Childbed fever kills mothers four times as often in the doctors’ clinic as in the midwives’ clinic next door, though both breathe the same air. Since the doctors began washing their hands in chlorine after dissecting corpses, deaths have fallen from 18 in a hundred births to 2. The cause comes on the doctors’ hands, not from the air both clinics share.

   #5771

   In October, the doctors examined a woman with a foul-smelling cancer of the womb, washed only with soap, and went on to twelve women in labor. Eleven of them died, though no corpse was involved.

   #5772

   Childbed fever comes from decaying matter, from corpses or from the living, like a cancer or a festering wound, carried to the mothers on hands and instruments, and now and then through a ward’s air. Wash hands in chlorinated lime between every examination, and the fever goes.