He Saved Mothers With Handwashing And Died In An Asylum — Ignaz Semmelweis

Chapter 1 of 5The Man the Textbooks Cite and the Guards Restrained

July, eighteen sixty-five. In a ward in Döbling, on the outskirts of Vienna, a man of forty-seven tries to cross a door that should not be closed to him. The guards reach him before he makes the corridor. They seize him by the arms, by the torso, by whatever they can hold. There is no ceremony in the struggle, only the brute mechanics of subduing a body that resists. The door closes again. No one in that room yet knows that this body belongs to one of the doctors who saved more lives than almost any other in the history of European obstetrics.

Today that name is carved into the façade of a university in Budapest. It appears in every manual of infection control printed anywhere in the world. It lends its name to a psychological phenomenon that describes the human instinct to reject evidence that unsettles us. The medical establishment cites him with reverence at its congresses. And it was that same medical establishment that, on that July night, helped lure him to that ward under false pretences.

His name was Ignaz Semmelweis.

To understand how he came to that door, one must go back almost five decades, to a merchant's house in Tabán, a district in the hills of Buda, above the Danube. There he was born in eighteen eighteen, the fifth of ten children of a spice merchant of German descent. An Austrian empire that spoke German in its universities and Latin on its diplomas had little room reserved for a Hungarian with a German surname, raised among sacks of pepper and cinnamon. He was an outsider twice over: by origin, and by his father's trade, far removed from the nobility and the academic gown that ruled Vienna.

There is something no biographer need invent, because it is already in the family record: that shop sold aromas that perfumed whole kitchens across Buda. The son of that shop would end up obsessed, years later, with a smell no doctor of his time cared to name aloud inside a hospital. The smell of hands that had just touched a corpse before touching a woman in labour.

But that would come later. In eighteen thirty-seven, at nineteen, Semmelweis arrived in Vienna at his father's wish, who wanted to see him become a lawyer. He enrolled in Law. Something in the Faculty of Medicine — perhaps an anatomy lecture he attended almost out of curiosity — changed his course almost at once. He abandoned the legal codes for the dissection rooms.

The Viennese medical elite of those years was a closed, hierarchical world, prouder of the authority of its lineage than of its clinical results. Semmelweis had no weighty surname, no aristocratic patronage. What he did have was a methodical obsession with observing and counting that his professors noted early on. In eighteen forty-four he earned his doctorate in Medicine and completed, besides, a master's degree in obstetrics — a specialty regarded as minor by much of his profession, barely a rung above midwifery. Two years later, in eighteen forty-six, he secured a post as assistant in the First Obstetrical Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital, the largest in Europe. There, among wooden beds and poorly ventilated wards, he would meet a figure no manual of the age could explain.

That collision between a disciplined outsider and an unexplained mortality is what, in time, would set him on course against the very medicine that had trained him. There are still years to go before Döbling. But the question that scene of eighteen sixty-five leaves hanging deserves an answer before we go on: what exactly did this man do, with those very hands the guards were now restraining, that led the same profession that honours him today to decide, back then, that his place was behind a locked door?