In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that Doctors wash their hands between Handling dead bodies and helping mothers give birth. He was branded as insane and died in a lunatic asylum.
by SoggyMusic6183
In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that Doctors wash their hands between Handling dead bodies and helping mothers give birth. He was branded as insane and died in a lunatic asylum.
by SoggyMusic6183
24 Comments
why is this downvoted lol
Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)
His theory was not accepted by most doctors, leading to him being fired from his job. Eventually he published a book, but this was attacked by critics who destroyed his public image. He turned to drinking and was eventually admitted to a lunatic asylum where he was beaten by guards, causing a gangrene infection which killed him.
Yes, and watching surgeons perform surgery and wiping their hands on their apron as they continue to perform the surgery. Oftentimes it wasn’t the surgery that killed you, but the opportunistic infection from all the pathogens that got into the wound. Now people can understand how crucial it was when penicillin was discovered.
Just a reminder that people are really really really tribal and collectively stupid.
His discovery was inconvenient, because it implied that the doctors had been doing things wrong, which they really didn’t like to hear.
So, instead of investigating and being happy with such a discovery, they rejected it and pushed back to avoid a slightly uncomfortable feeling of hindsight guilt.
Just a little dirt
And yet today doctors and other healthcare workers are still infecting themsleves and others because they don’t wash their hands.
[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7094481/](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7094481/)
[https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/hand-washing-stops-infections-so-why-do-health-care-workers-skip-it](https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/hand-washing-stops-infections-so-why-do-health-care-workers-skip-it)
Bacteria can move, baby!
JD Vance . . !
As long as he practices social distancing, who cares?
died=beaten to death in a lunatic asylum by staff.
At least the most prestigious medical university in Hungary carries his name.
If he was right, the Powers That Be in contemporary medicine had collectively killed hundreds of pregnant mothers and their children. So he *had* to be wrong. They couldn’t live with themselves otherwise.
Human history really is 2 steps backwards 1 step forward.
Cantstandya?
In a bit of a defense of the practitioners of the time, imagine if one of your colleagues started saying that there were invisible beings all around us that only he knew about and that they were the cause of most illness and death, but you could stop them by constantly performing a weird ritual involving water. He was insistent to the point of mania about this, and accused those who did not perform his ritual of knowingly murdering their patients.
Now, this in fact happens to be true, but at the time, it was more consistent with a man in the middle of a mental crisis.
he was ahead of his time by one bar of soap
Welcome to America 2026.
People who did that to him are equivalent of today’s flat earther antivaxxers…
Annddddd yet here we are
bit of an overreaction to being told you have to wash your hands imo
His case alone should be a proof that Karma is a BS concept. Those who orchestrated attacks against him would have lived their life to the fullest, often commanding respect and control yet this poor guy died in such misery.
How much longer before they realised he was right ?
Or did somebody else receive the credit years later ?
The fact that he was ridiculed for suggesting basic hygiene is genuinely disturbing when you think about how many lives could have been saved.