By Morton Thompson
Originally published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., 0000-00-00
This historical novel covers the life of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who discovered the cause of childbed fever more than 100 years ago. Carefully researched and vividly written, the book is educational because of what it reveals about human nature. Semmelweis, you may remember, was the young doctor who noticed that the mothers who were delivered in the Second Clinic of the Viennese hospital, where midwives attended births, and the mothers who gave birth in the streets on the way to the hospital were much more likely to survive childbirth than those who were delivered in the doctors’ clinics. The doctors and medical students were infecting the mothers by giving vaginal examinations with unwashed hands after dissecting cadavers.
If you have ever wondered how it could be that the obstetricians at the Vienna maternity hospital could continue to tolerate the terrible mortality rate from childbed fever in the First Clinic, which sometimes reached as high as 40 percent, while Semmelweis was in their midst, explaining the cause and pleading with them to just try his protocol of cleanliness, this book is bound to shed some light. It was not only the Viennese doctors who found it impossible to accept the truth; Semmelweis was ridiculed or ignored for many years by the most learned doctors of Europe. By the 1880s there was a long list of obstetricians who, after Semmelweis’ death, claimed to oppose him, but put out his concepts as their own.
You can read plenty of accounts of the bare bones of how Semmelweis came to realize what was causing the fearful death rate of the First Clinic and still not really understand all the human and administrative forces that worked against acceptance of his ideas. Reading this book puts you in the position of knowing what Semmelweis knew and feeling his frustration with his colleagues when they, for their various reasons, refused to consider that he might be right. Talk about burnout . . . Semmelweis must have had the grandest case ever, having to watch thousands of women die while he was trying to convince his colleagues how to save them. The tragedy of his life was that he did not live to see his ideas accepted as true and put into practice. Instead, he was seen to be insane and was committed to a mental asylum. He died of blood poisoning following a wound infection, probably from a beating he received a few days after being admitted. His tragedy passed on to the next generation of his family, when his son killed himself at the age of twenty-five, despairing that his father’s teachings ever would be accepted. If he had waited five more years, he would have seen the doctrine begin to spread among the younger doctors.
The relevance of Semmelweis’ life and experience to us today is that human behavior has not changed all that much. People who claim to be scientific still oppose or ignore ideas and practices that would benefit mothers and babies, especially when these ideas come from midwives. We shouldn’t forget that the event that immediately preceded Semmelweis’ admittance to the ward for maniacs at the Lower Austrian Mental Home. He attended a faculty meeting where he was to read a report. His former assistant, József Fleischer relates that when he was called on to do so, “he rose, took a piece of paper from his trouser pocket and, to the stupefaction of those present, began to read the text of the midwives’ oath.” It translates something like this: “I swear by the Almighty and all knowing God that I shall never mistreat patients entrusted to my care . . .”
