 the hand washing nonsense and did not renew Dr. Semmelweis’s contract, giving the job instead to Dr. Semmelweis’s rival Dr. Carl Braun.5
Dr. Semmelweis moved from Austria to Hungary after losing his job and took a job at a small hospital in the town of Pest. There he again employed his hand washing technique and reduced maternal mortality to less than 1%.5 Unfortunately, colleagues at the University of Pest again disagreed with Dr. Semmelweis’s conclusions and guidelines. Seeking to change the establishment, Dr. Semmelweis applied for a position in the University of Pest’s faculty only to again lose the job to his nemesis Dr. Braun.
Dr. Semmelweis never gave up on his radical clean hands theory despite the fervor of his opposition. Unfortunately, this battle with his naysayers was tremendously taxing on Dr. Semmelweis’s mental health. In 1865, at the ripe old age of 46 Dr. Semmelweis began to drink more heavily, frequent ladies of the night, and behave in a generally reckless manner. Whether his deterioration resulted from a syphilitic process (common at the time) or depression, Dr. Semmelweis was decompensating quickly.
At the age of 47, a colleague invited Dr. Semmelweis to tour a new hospital. Only once Dr. Semmelweis arrived did he realize that it was an insane asylum and that he was being committed. Dr. Semmelweis put up a tremendous struggle while he was being ushered into a straitjacket by a number of guards. Sometime during this struggle Dr. Semmelweis sustained a wound that quickly became infected in the bleach-free insane asylum. In a horrific twist of irony, Dr. Semmelweis died 14 days after being “admitted” to the insane asylum of sepsis; the very same infection of the blood that the women he had spent his life trying to save had died from.
Twenty years after Dr. Semmelweis’s death, Dr. Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, validating Dr. Semmelweis’s prescient notion of contamination. Semmelweis now has multiple hospitals named after him, his visage adorns an Austrian commemorative coin, and every medical student learns about his groundbreaking establishment of the modern antiseptic technique.
- Semmelweis IF, Carter KC. The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press; 1983.
- Cunningham FG, ed. Williams Obstetrics. 24th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Medical; 2014.
- Callaghan WM. Overview of maternal mortality in the United States. Semin Perinatol. 2012;36(1):2-6. doi:10.1053/j.semperi.2011.09.002.
- Cipolla CM. Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age. New Haven: Yale University Press; 1992.
- Carter KC, Carter BR. Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis, with a New Introduction by the Authors. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers; 2005.