Semmelweiss

Semmelweiss

In the 1850s many women who gave birth in hospital died a few days later. This illness was called childbed fever, however noone knew what it was or how to stop it from happening.

Ignaz Semmelweiss, who was a doctor at the time realised that his medical students were going straight from disecting dead bodies to delivering a baby without washing their hands. He wondered if they were somehow carrying the cause of disease from a dead body to the mother throught their unwashewd hands.

He had proof of this when another doctor cut himself whilst working on a dead body and…