The Medical Discovery Nobody Took Seriously

In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have immediately changed the way hospitals all over the world operated. One problem though... no one believed him. At Vienna General Hospital, mothers in the doctors’ maternity ward were dying of childbed fever at horrifying rates, while the ward run by midwives was comparatively safe. After his friend and colleague Jakob Kolletschka died following a scalpel accident and showed similar symptoms to childbed fever, it got him thinking… could it be that doctors handling cadavers before delivering babies was causing the women to become ill and die? One might assume that the drop in death rates once Semmelweis implemented his new hand-washing policy would be enough to convince the medical community that he was onto something pretty major. However, without an explanation as to why hand washing worked, the discovery was not taken seriously, and many more people would die as a result.