Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Ignaz Semmelweis and His Simple Great Idea (Encore)

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Subscribe to the podcast!  https://podfollow.com/everythingeverywhere/ In the mid-19th century, a Hungarian physician advocated for an incredibly simple technique that would go on to save millions of lives.  However, when he first proposed it, his idea wasn’t just ignored, it was vehemently rejected by the very people who could have used it to save lives. Not only was the idea rejected, but he was ridiculed to a point that might have led to his early death. Learn more about Ignaz Semmelweis and how no good deed goes unpunished, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. -------------------------------- Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/EEDailyPodcast/ Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. In the mid-19th century, a Hungarian physician advocated for an incredibly simple technique which would go on to save millions of lives. However, when he first proposed it, his idea wasn't just ignored. It was vehemently rejected by the very people who could have used it to save lives. Not only was the idea rejected, but he was ridiculed to a point that might have led to his early death. Learn more about Ignis Semmelweis and how no good deed goes unpunished on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment

your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nicolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension. Nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of

listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to nothing much happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. Ignis Semmelweis was born in 1818 in the town of Buda, Hungary, which today is part of the city of Budapest. His family was ethnically German and his father was a well-off businessman. As a young man, he attended the University of Vienna, intended to study law, but after a year switched to medicine. He received his medical degree in 1844 with an intent to specialize in internal medicine. However, he was rejected at the clinic

where he wanted a position and instead took a position at the obstetrical clinic at the Vienna General Hospital in 1846. Before I go any further, I need to explain the state of medicine at this point in history. The mid-19th century didn't have anything close to what we would consider modern medicine. The germ theory of infection still didn't exist, and many medical professionals still believed in things like miasmas and humors, and would prescribe things like bloodletting to patients. Also at this time, the mortality rate for women in childbirth was significantly higher than what it is today. The primary cause of death was something called puerperal fever, also known as childbed fever.

It was a disease that would strike women within days of giving birth, and would often lead to raging fevers, putrid pus admitting from the birth canal, open sores in the abdomen, and finally, sepsis and death. The maternity wards at hospitals at this time in Europe were primarily for lower-class women and often prostitutes. The deal was that women who came to the hospital

could receive free care, but their care would usually be overseen by students as it was a training hospital. When Semmelweis arrived at Vienna General, it had two separate maternity wards that were run quite differently. One ward was run by male doctors, and the other ward was run by female midwives. However, the outcome in the two wards were radically different. The ward with the doctors had a mortality rate that was five times that of the ward with the midwives. The reputation of the doctor's ward was so bad that women would often cry and plead not to go there,

and there were some that would hold off on their arrival so they could give birth in the street, as if they gave birth in route to the hospital, they could get the same benefits as if they gave birth in the hospital. Shockingly, women who gave birth in the street had a lower mortality rate than those who gave birth in the doctor's ward. This condition of high maternity hospital mortality rates was the case all over Europe. Some of Weiss wanted to figure out why one ward had rates so much higher than the other. So we tried to isolate a variable in what the midwives did that the doctors weren't doing or vice versa. The two wards had operations that were mostly the same, but clearly something was different. One of the first things he noticed was that the midwives made women give birth lying on their side,

whereas the doctors would have women give birth on their backs. So he made the doctors change the birthing positions, and nothing happened. Then he noticed that when a woman died of childbed fever, a priest ringing a bell would walk through the ward. He thought that this may have increased stress levels, so he got that to change. And, again, nothing happened. The problem also couldn't have been overcrowding, because the midwife ward always had more women than the doctor's ward. The breakthrough he was looking for came when one of his close friends died. His friend had been doing an autopsy on a woman who had died from puripural fever,

when a student accidentally nicked him with a scalpel. Several days later, his friend died with symptoms very similar to childbed fever. What Semmelweis realized was that performing autopsies and handling corpses was something that doctors did that the midwives didn't do. There was something on the cadavers that was passing the illness to the women. He didn't know what it was, so he called it cadaverous particles. His radical solution to this problem is one that revolutionized medicine. His instructions to the doctors in the hospital were to wash their hands. Yep, that was his solution and the idea which changed medicine.

It does not sound like a big deal to us because the idea of germs and cleanliness are so ingrained. However, back then, this was a really radical idea. He didn't just suggest that the doctors washed their hands with water, however. He recommended that they washed their hands with chlorinated lime. The only reason he suggested this was because it was so effective at removing the horrible smell from cadaver tissue. He didn't know how effective chlorine was as a disinfectant because he didn't know about germs. When the doctors implemented this hand-washing regimen, mortality quickly dropped to levels on a par with the midwife ward. In April of 1847, the mortality rate in the doctor's ward was 18.3%.

The new hand-washing protocol was implemented in mid-May, and by June, mortality was down to 2.2% and 1.2% in July. Eventually, this was extended to washing all medical instruments, and childbed fever was all but eliminated in the hospital. The results were circulated to other hospitals in Europe, but Semmelweis himself didn't actually write anything. Now, if these results seem like very strong evidence in support of hand washing, that's because it is. However, Semmelweis' call for other doctors to start washing their hands was loudly rejected. For starters, Semmelweis' theory flew in the face of the way medicine was taught at the time, so there was a great deal of resistance to it. Semmelweis had no scientific explanation as to why it worked.

He just knew that it worked. Secondly, many doctors interpreted his findings to think that they were personally responsible for the deaths of their patients, which was something that they resisted. And finally, he was kind of a jerk about it. Rather than trying to persuade other doctors about his findings, he would often just insult and berate them in public, making him enemies along the way. In 1848, Semmelweis lost his job at Vienna General, which may have partially been due to his personality and partially due to the Hungarian revolution and the fact that he was from Humpherson. Hungary. He moved back to Budapest and in 1851 took an unpaid position at the obstetric ward at a small hospital. There too, he managed to all but eliminate childbed fever. In 1885, he was appointed the head of the maternity ward at the University of Pest, and, once again, brought the

mortality rate down to under 1% almost immediately. Eventually, Semmelweis became absent-minded, suffered from depression, and began drinking. He published a book in 1861 and attacked his critics publicly often insulting them. He couldn't hold a conversation with anyone without the discussion eventually turning to childbed fever. His behavior eventually became an embarrassment to his family and colleagues. He was committed to a mental institution where he died two weeks later at the age of 47 from an infection he received struggling with the guards. It's believed that he may have had dementia or could have suffered from syphilis, which many doctors who worked at free maternity wards often contracted. After his death, mortality rates at Pest University Maternity Clinic increased sixfold when the handwashing protocols were stopped.

Over time, of course, Ignace Semmelweis was proven right. In the decades after his death, researchers like Louis Pestor came up with the germ theory to explain why handwashing worked. And eventually, the actual bacteria that caused childhood fever was identified. Group A, hemolyticoccus. Believe it or not, handwashing is still an issue in some hospitals today. There are over 80,000 people who die each year in just the United States from hospital-acquired infections, and many of those could be prevented from improved hand-washing protocols. Today, Semmelweis is used as a case study in philosophy of science courses. The Semmelweis reflex is a name given to the tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.

Today, his work in developing antiseptic techniques has been acknowledged and celebrated. There is a Semmelweis University in Budapest, a Semmelweis Clinic for Women in Vienna, and the Semmelweis Prize is the highest medical prize awarded in Hungary. He has been on stamps, coins, and there's even a minor planet named after him. A film titled That Mothers Might Live won the Academy Award in 1938 for Best Short Film. It's a 10-minute film that's available for free on YouTube. What Ignace Sevelvice did was science in its purest form. He identified a problem, tested different variables,

hypothesized a solution and then tested it several times. Yet, his ideas were rejected because they flew in the face of what people believed. The lesson of Ignace Semmelweis is that you have to trust the data, even if it flies in the face of conventional wisdom, and even if it's about something as simple as washing your hands. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters,

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