The Semmelweis Reflex In 2017, it is common knowledge that bacteria live inside of corpses, and that bacteria can cause diseases. Almost every elementary schooler is fully aware of this fact. Nevertheless, at one point this was a groundbreaking discovery, one that was met with great skepticism and mockery. The German-Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis (July 1, 1818 – August 13, 1865) is credited with the discovery of what is now common sense: one should wash their hands between handling dead bodies and treating patients (Semmelweis Society International, n.d.). During Semmelweis’ time, disease was thought to be caused by “bad air” called miasmata, overcrowding, or lactation. It was the herculean task of Semmelweis to convince others that
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This too could not explain the enigmatic difference in death rates; the first hospital had such a terrible reputation, that patients avoided it at all costs. Subsequently, the second maternity hospital was far more crowded than the first, yet experienced a mere tenth of the death rate of the first (Hempel, …show more content…
One day, a pathologist in Queen’s Hospital in Kingston, Ontario pricked his finger while performing an autopsy on a woman who had died of a fever while on childbed, and promptly died in much the same manner as the pregnant women (Davis, 2015). Semmelweis then learned that whatever was killing the mothers was not unique to Vienna:
I brooded over the case with intense emotion, until suddenly a thought crossed my mind; at once it became clear to me that childbed fever and the death of Professor Kolletschka were one and the same because they both consist pathologically of the same anatomic changes. If, therefore, in the case of Professor Kolletschka . . . septic changes . . . arose from the inoculation of cadaver particles, then puerperal fever must originate from the same source. . . . (as qtd. in Tans & Brown,
This too could not explain the enigmatic difference in death rates; the first hospital had such a terrible reputation, that patients avoided it at all costs. Subsequently, the second maternity hospital was far more crowded than the first, yet experienced a mere tenth of the death rate of the first (Hempel, …show more content…
One day, a pathologist in Queen’s Hospital in Kingston, Ontario pricked his finger while performing an autopsy on a woman who had died of a fever while on childbed, and promptly died in much the same manner as the pregnant women (Davis, 2015). Semmelweis then learned that whatever was killing the mothers was not unique to Vienna:
I brooded over the case with intense emotion, until suddenly a thought crossed my mind; at once it became clear to me that childbed fever and the death of Professor Kolletschka were one and the same because they both consist pathologically of the same anatomic changes. If, therefore, in the case of Professor Kolletschka . . . septic changes . . . arose from the inoculation of cadaver particles, then puerperal fever must originate from the same source. . . . (as qtd. in Tans & Brown,