The Doctor They Called a Fool

In 1847, a young Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis made a devastating observation at Vienna General Hospital. Women in the doctors' ward were dying of childbed fever at five times the rate of those attended by midwives. Semmelweis discovered the cause: doctors were walking straight from autopsies to deliveries without washing their hands. When he instituted a simple chlorine handwashing protocol, the death rate plummeted from twelve percent to barely one.…