The Doctor They Refused to Hear

In 1847, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have saved thousands of lives. Working in a Vienna maternity ward where one in ten mothers died of childbed fever, he noticed that doctors were going straight from autopsies to delivering babies without washing their hands. When he instituted a simple handwashing policy with chlorinated lime, the death rate plummeted to barely one percent.…