Semmelweis reasoned that chloride’s effectiveness was the destruction of
the particles themselves. Within two months of Kolletschka’s death, a
bowl of chlorina liquida, a dilute concentration of the disinfectant, was
placed at the entrance to the First Division, with the order that every
medical attendant wash his hands. Within months, the puerperal death rate
plunged, until it was equal to the midwives’ ward, where no handling of
the cadavers had ever been performed. The seeds of a revolution were
sown and, in Vienna alone, the lives of thousands of women were poised to
be saved.
There is a reason you have never heard of Ignác Semmelweis, whose
serendipitous reasoning and insight should have made him a household
name. With many European countries teetering on revolution in 1848,
doctors were distracted and digging their heels into accepted tradition;
Semmelweis was not able to convince his colleagues of the rightness of
his radical idea. Instead, controversy raged on, and in time, Semmelweis
would lose status and eventually, his job. Despite the Viennese medical
giants (Rokitansky, Joseph Skoda, and Ferdinand Hebra) backing
Semmelweis, he could not break through the obtuse obstetrical leadership,
who were too defensive. He retreated back to Budapest, where he
languished for years until finally publishing his seminal book on the topic
of childbed fever.
Sherwin Nuland has called Semmelweis’s book “logorrheic, repetitious,
hectoring, accusatory, self-glorifying ... virtually unreadable.”^10 With
copies of his book he wrote open letters to his main detractors. To a
professor of obstetrics in Vienna, he wrote, “And you Herr Professor, have
been a partner in this massacre. The murder must cease, and in order that
the murder ceases, I will keep watch ...” To a professor of obstetrics in
Würzburg, he cried, “I declare before God and the world that you are a
murderer and the ‘History of Childbed Fever’ would not be unjust to you if
it memorialized you as a medical Nero.”^11 He became a raving lunatic and
a righteous martyr.
In the end, Semmelweis seems to have lost his mind. Roaming the
streets of Budapest, consorting with prostitutes, dressing like a vagrant,
and mumbling to himself, driven either by the constant state of stress,
organic mental disease, or possibly syphilis, the forty-seven-year-old
doctor was undoubtedly going insane. His own wife coaxed him to return
to Vienna, with Ferdinand Hebra (considered the father of dermatology)