The Godfather of Handwashing...

I hope that everyone is holding up as well as you can and staying as safe as you can.

I heard a podcast recently (https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispatch-2-every-day-ignaz-semmelweis-day) and learned about a scientist who lived in the 1800s and was the earliest advocate of handwashing. His story feels particularly powerful now, given all that we do know about viruses – and also because of all that we don’t know.

Semmelweis was born in Hungary in 1818, and became a doctor in 1844, specializing in obstetrics. He started working at the Vienna General Hospital, and learned that the average maternal mortality rate was much higher in the “First Clinic” – a whopping rate of 10% versus 4% in the “Second Clinic”. On paper, the two used the same techniques, but the First Clinic was a teaching hospital for medical students while the Second Clinic was for midwives only. It felt counter-intuitive to him that the clinic with more skilled individuals would have a higher mortality rate.

Eventually, Semmelweis hypothesized that the medical students had “cadaverous particles” on their hands because they went from performing autopsies to delivering babies in the First Clinic. He decided to create a policy where medical students had to wash their hands in a chlorinated solution in between their autopsies and patient work. As a result, the mortality rate for the First Clinic dropped to that of the Second Clinic. The death rate for mothers giving birth was zero in the first two months after this policy started.

You would think that such a stunning turn of events would change the medical establishment with its publication in any journal. You would be wrong.

Semmelweis’s study conflicted with what the standing opinions in the medical field were at the time. First, he didn’t really have an explanation as to why washing hands mattered. Second, many doctors were offended by the suggestion that their hands were dirty, or that there were unseen particles on their hands that were infecting other patients. The end result was that his ideas were largely rejected by the medical community. He died in 1865, aged 47, in an insane asylum from an infection in his right hand. His theory would only be valued years after his death – when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory.

Semmelweis’s story is a reminder that eventually – in months or in years – we will find ourselves out of this COVID-19 crisis. It will take the groundbreaking work of a scientist, testing out a theory, in a lab somewhere around the globe. And in praising this scientist, we must also remember to pay tribute to the others in the medical profession that got us to this point – those who tried and failed, ruling out certain ingredients for a vaccine; and those who tried and succeeded, but were quieted because their opinions were uncommon or unconventional. Here’s to hoping it is months instead of years…

-Reshma