Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis was born on 1 July 1818 in the Tabán district of Buda, the fifth of nine children of a wealthy grocer. He attended the Catholic high school from a young age, distinguishing himself as a diligent student, although he always spoke Hungarian with a marked German accent.
At nineteen he enrolled in law school in Vienna, at the behest of his father who imagined him as a military judge. However, it was the casual attendance of a doctor friend’s lectures that changed his life: fascinated by the anatomical room, he changed faculties and began studying medicine at the prestigious Viennese Medical School. There he trained alongside three great medical figures of the time: the pathologist Karl von Rokitansky, the clinician Josef Škoda and the dermatologist Ferdinand von Hebra, who became his most faithful friend.
He graduated in 1844 and, after some failed attempts to obtain assisting positions in pathological and clinical anatomy, turned towards obstetrics. In 1846 he also received his doctorate in surgery and obstetrics, and obtained a two-year appointment as an assistant in the first division of the obstetric clinic of the Vienna General Hospital.
A mystery that obsessed him
As soon as he entered service, Semmelweis found himself faced with a reality that deeply disturbed him: a very high number of hospitalized women died of puerperal fever, an illness that manifested itself with high fever, pain and general malaise, often lethal. Mortality rates in his department reached peaks of 11%, while in the second division of the same hospital — run not by doctors but by midwives — mortality was consistently four times lower.
The medicine of the time offered imaginative explanations: rotting uterine fluids, stagnant intestinal feces, even toxic gases in the air. None of these hypotheses convinced him. Semmelweis conducted autopsies after autopsies, accumulating data, observing, comparing, looking for an answer that his colleagues seemed unwilling to find.
Love at first sight: the death of a friend
The turning point came in a dramatic way. A colleague and friend, Jakob Kolletschka, died suddenly after injuring himself with a scalpel during an autopsy. Analyzing his medical records, Semmelweis was struck by a disturbing coincidence: the lesions found on Kolletschka’s body were identical to those of the women who died from puerperal fever.
The conclusion was striking: both deaths had the same origin. The doctors and students who performed autopsies in the morning and visited women giving birth immediately afterwards, without washing their hands, were carrying something lethal with them. He didn’t yet know what it was precisely – Pasteur’s bacterial theory would only arrive in 1864 – but he understood the mechanism of transmission.
The solution: a simple gesture
In May 1847 Semmelweis imposed an apparently banal measure: anyone who entered his department had to wash their hands with a solution of calcium hypochlorite. He also added the obligation to change bed linen regularly. The results were immediate and extraordinary: mortality, which in 1846 had reached 11.4%, dropped to 5% already in 1847, to settle between 1 and 2% the following year, in line with the values of the midwives’ department. The numbers spoke clearly. Yet the medical world didn’t want to listen.
The rejection of the scientific community
Instead of being greeted with interest, Semmelweis received hostility, jealousy and distrust. Its director Johann Klein, a staunch supporter of educational autopsies, did not renew his contract. Colleagues of the Viennese School opposed a theory that implicitly accused them of being, unintentionally, the cause of their patients’ deaths. Among his most tenacious opponents was even Rudolf Virchow, considered the father of cellular pathology.
Returning to Hungary, Semmelweis applied his method successfully at the San Rocco hospital in Pest, obtaining the same positive results. In 1861 he published his major work, Etiology, concept and prophylaxis of puerperal feverbut the scientific community continued to ignore it or openly fight it.
The tragic end
The isolation and systematic rejection of his ideas consumed him. He fell into a deep depression and in 1865 was admitted to an asylum. He died on August 13 of the same year from septicemia – probably caused by wounds inflicted by the guards and by hygienically inadequate care. A bitter and cruel irony: what killed him was exactly what he had fought against all his life.
Posthumous rehabilitation
Only after his death did Semmelweis’ intuitions find scientific confirmation, thanks to the works of Pasteur and Lister on the bacterial theory. Budapest dedicated a monument to him in 1894, then a statue in 1906, and finally named the medical university after him which still bears his name today.
The philosopher Carl Gustav Hempel cited it as an exemplary model of scientific research based on empirical evidence. The writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline dedicated his degree thesis to him. Kurt Vonnegut publicly referred to him as his personal hero.
Today it is called Semmelweis reflex the psychological resistance to accepting discoveries that call into question consolidated beliefs: a phenomenon that he, more than anyone else, experienced firsthand.
Just six years ago, Google also celebrated the discoveries with a Doodle on the anniversary of the start of Semmelweis’ internship as head of residents at the largest obstetric clinic in Vienna. Today it is thanks to his discoveries that we have an additional weapon to eradicate diseases as we did with typhoid and cholera.
HERE we remind you how to wash your hands well.
