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Wash Your Hands, Doctors… Seriously, Wash Them!
TDW #41— wakeful — (instruct) (407 words)
Dr Semmelweis had spent wakeful nights considering his theory.
In 1850, he stepped up to the podium in the Vienna Medical Society’s lecture hall, a grand and ornately decorated room where some of medicine’s greatest discoveries were first announced.
He felt assured, but knew that what he was about to say would be poorly received.
His ultimate message was clear. He was here to instruct his fellow surgeons to wash their hands. To do this, or not, was a life-or-death decision that would go a long way to preventing a deadly malady known as “childbed” or puerperal (child and parent) fever.
The statistics at the time, that being the mid-nineteenth century, were singularly unimpressive.
Five women in 1,000 died in deliveries performed by midwives at home
Yet when doctors working in the best maternity hospitals in Europe and America performed deliveries, the maternal death rate was often up to 20 times greater
Childbed fever took hold, causing “raging fevers, putrid pus emanating from the birth canal, painful abscesses in the abdomen and chest, and an irreversible descent into an absolute hell of sepsis and death — all within…
