The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 4: Little Bits Of Corpse

Episode Date: March 1, 2016

Was he a lunatic or a genius? Sometimes it's hard to tell, especially when you're telling the world that doctors are killing their patients.

This is the way I heard it. No one knows the exact moment at which Iggy lost his mind, but there is no disputing the fact. He lost it. A doctor of medicine, once respected and admired by friends and colleagues, Iggy had declared war on the entire medical profession and burned every professional bridge he'd worked so hard to build. So what exactly went wrong?

What pushed Iggy over the edge? The short answer? Women. The hospital where Iggy worked had a maternity ward with two separate clinics. The first clinic was where the doctors worked. The second clinic was where the students worked. Three percent of the women who gave birth in the student clinic died soon thereafter. But in the doctor clinic where experienced physicians oversaw every birth,

the death rate was 500 percent greater. Iggy was horrified by the disparity and so were the patients. expectant mothers begged and pleaded to go into the student clinic. Some even gave birth on the sidewalk in front of the hospital rather than be admitted into the doctor clinic. Iggy was determined to understand why so many mothers were dying in the care of experienced physicians. Could it be overcrowding? No. The student clinic actually had more patients and the mortality rate was lower.

Could it be the climate? No. The temperatures in both clinics were pretty, much the same. In the student clinic, mothers were giving birth on their sides. In the doctor clinic, they gave birth on their backs. So Iggy had mothers in the doctor clinic convert to their sides, and no change in the mortality rate. Iggy considered every possible discrepancy, no matter how unlikely. In the doctor clinic, priests strolled the corridors and rang a bell whenever a young mother died. Could this be frightening the other patients?

Were young mothers literally dying of fear? Iggy told the priest to lay off the bells. And? No change. One day, a pathologist at Iggy's hospital died soon after performing an autopsy on one of the dead mothers. It occurred to Iggy that the students in the second clinic didn't perform autopsies. Only the doctors did that. So, what if the doctors were somehow,

passing little pieces of corpse back and forth between the cadavers and the pregnant mothers. Now that was a completely insane notion. But still, he wanted to test his theory. So Iggy went to the lab and concocted a foul-smelling solution that made both doctors and patients wrinkle their noses and disgust. Then he instructed the doctors to administer the solution with a strange new procedure. The doctors complied skeptically and within weeks. The mortality rates and the doctor's clinic dropped by 90%. The numbers were undeniable, and Iggy was exalted. There was just one problem.

Iggy was suggesting the doctors themselves had been responsible for all those unnecessary deaths, and that combined with his obsession around little, pieces of corpse was just too much to accept. The doctors returned to their old procedures, and young mothers returned to dying in record numbers. Iggy was incredulous. He published the results of his test and condemned his colleagues in the press. Your teachings, he wrote, are based on the dead bodies of innocent women slaughtered through ignorance. I denounce you all before God and the world as murderers. Ultimately, Iggy was fired for his discovery,

or maybe his bedside manner. It's hard to say for sure, but either way, in his frantic desire to be believed, Iggy had become utterly unbelievable. He lobbied other doctors and other clinics. He wrote more angry letters, but in the end, he succeeded only in alienating himself from friends and scaring those closest.

to him, including his wife. One day, the doctors at a hospital in Vienna invited him to evaluate some sick patients. But upon arriving, Iggy learned he wasn't there as the newest physician. No, he was there as the newest patient in the Viennese asylum for the insane. Iggy resisted and was beaten by the guards badly. Bleeding and broken, he was put into a straight jacket and confined. to a cell, and then just 14 days after he was admitted as clinically insane, he was discharged as clinically deceased.

Ironically, Dr. Ignes Samovice died from the same thing that killed all those young mothers he had fought so hard to save, a simple blood infection that led to a deadly fever brought on by little pieces of corpse, or as Louis Pasteur would call them 20. years later. Germs. In time, science would vindicate Dr. Sammelweis, but in life, the savior of mothers died a sad and pathetic death. He was ridiculed for his ingenious, antiseptic of chlorine and lime, and locked away for his dogged insistence that all doctors must do the same thing before delivering a baby, disinfect, and wash their hands. We'll never know. how many millions of lives were saved by Iggy's radical idea,

but I think we can conclude from his own death in 1865 that cleanliness is not always next to godliness. Sometimes it's next to insanity, and the line between crazy and brilliant was all too easily washed away. Anyway, that's the way I heard it.