Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis

author

Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis

1818–1865

Remembered as the doctor who pushed medicine toward handwashing, he helped reveal why so many women were dying of childbed fever in 19th-century hospitals. His simple insistence on cleanliness saved lives, even though many of his contemporaries resisted the idea.

1 Audiobook

Zwei offene Briefe an Dr. J. Spaeth, Professor der Geburtshilfe an der k. k. Josefs-Akademie in Wien, und an Hofrath Dr. F. W. Scanzoni, Professor der Geburtshilfe zu Würzburg

Zwei offene Briefe an Dr. J. Spaeth, Professor der Geburtshilfe an der k. k. Josefs-Akademie in Wien, und an Hofrath Dr. F. W. Scanzoni, Professor der Geburtshilfe zu Würzburg

by Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis

About the author

Born in Buda on July 1, 1818, Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis studied medicine in Vienna and became an obstetrician at a time when childbirth in hospitals could be dangerously unsafe. While working at the Vienna General Hospital, he noticed that women in one maternity clinic were dying from puerperal fever far more often than in another and set out to understand why.

In 1847, Semmelweis connected those deaths to contamination carried on the hands of doctors and medical students who moved from autopsies to the delivery ward. After he introduced handwashing with a chlorinated lime solution, mortality dropped sharply. The idea seems obvious today, but at the time many physicians rejected his findings, and he struggled to win broad acceptance.

Semmelweis later worked in Budapest and published his ideas, but recognition came slowly and largely after his death in Vienna on August 13, 1865. He is now widely honored as an early pioneer of antiseptic practice and is often remembered as the "savior of mothers."