06/12/2021
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THE PHYSICIAN WHO STILL SAVES YOUR LIFE TODAY 🧽 ðŸ¦
Ignaz Semmelweis was a physician from Hungary. Whilst working in a hospital in Vienna he discovered that more patients in the maternity ward were having higher death rates from childbed fever.
The world at the time believed that the fever was transmitted through poisonous gases in the air.
Dr Semmelweis realised that the maternity ward was staffed by doctors who were also conducting autopsies and then delivering babies within the same day.
In 1847, Dr Semmelweis attended an autopsy of a doctor who had died from blood poisoning who completed autopsies regularly, the doctor had cut himself with a scalpel that he used to dissect a body with.
Dr Semmelweis noticed that the cut on his body matched the cuts on the body of the person he conducted an autopsy on. He concluded that the illness must have been transferred on the scalpel, not those poisonous gases in the air.
After his analysis, Dr Semmelweis asked all staff to scrub their hands with calcium chloride before they touched patients.The mortality rate dropped significantly.
Now for the sad part, when Dr Semmelweis presented his work to the medical community he was rejected and laughed at.
He ended up falling into depression and had major mental health issues. In 1865, Dr Semmelweis was tricked into visiting an insane asylum.
He died after 2 weeks of being there due to being beaten and catching gangrene from a wound.
20 years after his death, the medical community eventually adopted Dr Semmelweis’s theory.
