Ignaz Semmelweis: The Physician who saved lives by championing hand-washing
The practice of hand-washing which may look common and now part of our daily lives didn’t just start overnight. Several painstaking findings by Ignaz Semmelweis led to the discovery which is now saving lots of lives and preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
Times like this when the world is battling deadly infectious disease like coronavirus and others like Lassa Fever, bring back memory of men and women who have walked this land with novel discoveries, that may look ordinary, but have continued to save the world and solve huge health challenges decades and centuries after their exit.
Who is Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis?
According to the United States National Center for Biotechnology Information, Semmelweis was a Hungarian doctor who became a hero for championing the practice of hand-washing among his colleagues to save lives and stop the spread of infectious disease.
In his late 20s, the young medical doctor took up a job in the maternity clinic of the General Hospital in Vienna, Austria in the mid-1800s. Worried by the high mortality rates, he started collecting personal data to figure out why so many women in maternity wards were dying from puerperal fever — commonly known as childbed fever.
He studied two maternity wards in the hospital. One staffed by all male doctors and medical students, the other staffed by female midwives. After counting the number of deaths on each ward, Semmelweis discovered that women in the clinic staffed by doctors and medical students died at a rate nearly five times higher than women in the midwives’ clinic.
His next finding would be why it was happening.
He started trying out possible causes of the mortality and his first thought was the mode of giving birth. In the midwives’ clinic, women gave birth on their sides, while in the doctors’ clinic, women gave birth on their backs. So he had women in the doctors’ clinic give birth on their sides. The result remained the same.
After trying other options and couldn’t find the ‘why’, he became frustrated and took a leave. On his return, one of his colleagues had died from the same fever.
His colleague’s death offered him a clue that led to his life-saving discovery in 1847. Still worried about why more women were dying from childbed fever in the doctors’ clinic than in the midwives’ clinic, he later discovered that doctors were doing autopsies and the midwives weren’t. So he hypothesized that there were little pieces of corpse that medical students were getting on their hands from the corpses they dissected. And when they delivered the babies, these particles would get inside the women who would develop the disease and die.
So he ordered his medical staff to start washing their hands and instruments not just with soap but with a chlorine solution. He chose the chlorine because he thought it would be the best way to get rid of any smell left behind by the little bits of corpse. His hypothesis worked and dramatically reduced the rate of childbed fever.
Semmelweis would later run into trouble with his colleagues who became upset because his hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women. He made so many influential enemies with his discovery, lost his job and developed mental condition afterwards. In 1865, at age 47, he died at the mental asylum he was committed to.
Even if his marvelous ‘wash your hand’ discovery was not well appreciated during his time, it would later become part of global culture and habits that medical practitioners and the whole world now prescribe as the first step to prevent the spread of germs and infectious diseases.
Over a century after Semmelweis walked this ground, his novel discovery that has continued to save lives is being promoted by Dettol. With the spread of coronavirus across the world, the disinfectant manufacturing company, Reckitt Benckiser Plc is partnering with the Lagos State Government to take the hand-washing campaign to pupils in Lagos schools where students and teachers are being enlightened on the benefits of good hygiene practices such as hand-washing, and other precautionary measures against communicable diseases.
There’s no better time than now to catch them young and that’s exactly what Dettol is doing with its School Hygiene Programme.
This story was first published on March 13, 2020.
Cover design by Tobi Yinka
