The Doctor His Colleagues Drove Away

In 1847, a young Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis made a startling discovery at Vienna General Hospital. He noticed that women in the maternity ward staffed by doctors were dying of childbed fever at five times the rate of those attended by midwives. The reason? Doctors were coming straight from autopsy rooms to deliver babies without washing their hands. When Semmelweis instituted a simple handwashing policy, the death rate plummeted almost overnight.…