Baguio City – Many may not realize an undeniable fact that medical doctors in the 1800’s never washed their hands after dissecting a corpse and with those unwashed hands set forth to deliver babies.
Strange, it may seem, but, well, they did.
Until handwashing’s’ life-saving power was brought to the fore during that time by a physician who hailed from Hungary – to the unwelcome shock of the resisting medical community.
A pioneering endeavor that cost the physician his liberty, sanity and life.
So take seriously advice on handwashing in this abnormal pandemic time, and even in normal times, if only for Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) and Region 1’s populace be appraised of a bitter truth about the physician who broke open benefits of handwashing in the corridors of medicine but, for his singular trailblazing in 1847, was instead ostracized and condemned during that time by his fellow doctors who should’ve been the first to believe in the basic principle of clean hands.
It’s a true-to-life tragedy about Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, born July 1, 1818, a Hungarian physician, known as the first to introduce hospital hand disinfection standards, but for such contribution was instead drummed out of the service in 1865 at Vienna General Hospital where he worked.
His life story is, to anyone, as strange, and stranger still, than fiction.
But Dr. Semmelweis life claws at 2020, also a time of true-to-life tragedy of millions getting sick and thousands dying from just one disease and the importance of washing of the hands among the basic defenses against it, yet is unfortunately forgotten at times, ignored or taken for granted, like the colleagues of Semmelweis who ignored this simple fact in the early nineteenth century.
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Daily Laborer columnist accidentally stumbled on the life of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis sometime in 2006 when he was still with the Department of Health (DOH-CAR) as its regional Public Information Officer (PIO).
Intrigued that time by the life of Dr. Semmelweis, Daily Laborer dug deep and in 2007 uncovered that Dr. Semmelweis was appointed chief resident of the maternity ward of Vienna General Hospital in 1847.
But what troubled him most immediately after his appointment was his observation that 13 to 18 percent of new mothers in the ward which was staffed by doctors as well as students taking up medicine, succumbed to childbed or puerperal fever, now commonly termed by doctors today as postpartum infection.
Semmelweis investigated further and discovered it was a very sharp contrast to a ward handled only by midwives where only a mere two percent died of the same sickness.
After a deep probe, Semmelweis came to the hypothesis that the infection to the mothers was the result of untidy hands of the doctors, particularly that the same doctors also conducted autopsy.
These doctors conducted post mortems on the women who died of childbed fever. And with the same infected hands, these doctors delivered babies.
Semmelweis suspected that the untidy hands of the doctors and medical students manhandling the cadavers during autopsy have something to do with the deaths.
“Only the large number of deaths was an unquestionable reality, “Semmelweis wrote later in 1861 in his book, “The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.”
Before he wrote his book, however, Semmelweis struggled to find answers to the high percentage deaths of mothers-to-be in his ward.
But he was nowhere near his objective. He took a leave from duty to clear his head.
When he came back to Vienna General Hospital, he was informed his very good friend, Dr. Jakob Kolletschka died after he accidentally wounded his hand with a scalpel which he used during an autopsy on one of the women who gave birth but died.
Semmelweis brooded over Dr. Kolletschka’s death. “I was shattered,” Semmelweis was recorded to have profoundly stated, but his friend’s death became a big break for Semmelweis’s search for truth for the dying mothers.
Ironically, Dr. Kolletschka’s death, one may deem, became a good omen of gift from a dying friend.
For it slowly dawned upon Dr. Semmelweis that the death of his friend and the mothers was the result of “something,” that doctors carried in their hands after holding cadavers and dissecting them.
Semmelweis hypothesized that “there invisible particles of decaying matter, little pieces of corpse” clinging to the hands of doctors when they dissected.
And after dissecting and just wiping their hands, they delivered babies and the particles transferred into the women who labored and as a result, died, Semmelweis theorized.
For his reasoning, he required all those working in the maternity ward to disinfect their hands as well as the instruments used with chlorinated lime solution.
He became the forefront of a more scientific approach to medicine.
Immediately the result became apparent. Mortality rates in the ward dropped from 18.27 to 1.27 per cent. In 1848, the following year, no expectant mother died of puerperal fever.
And during those times, systematic and strict washing of hands was not a standard procedure in hospitals.
Unfortunately, doctors at Vienna General Hospital didn’t believe the theory of Dr. Semmelweis and instead ridiculed the new concept and Semmelweis himself to the point many conspired for his removal.
Indeed, many of the doctors were outraged by Semmelweis’s notion that their hands were responsible for the cause of the miserable deaths of the women. And for this, they plotted to have him out of Vienna.
For these unbelieving doctors believed then that diseases were caused by poisonous vapors or bad air.
Apparently, the science of bacteria was not yet understood very well.
Frustrated with his contemporaries, Semmelweis reacted in a way wherein he depicted the actions of the unbelieving doctors as an act of murder towards expectant mothers.
Even though many mothers survived because of the foresight of Semmelweis, the medical establishment during his time shunned him.
Only those who joined in the handwashing experiment of Semmelweis firmly believed in him, all who summarized his discovery as “unappreciated.”
If you think that the belief, “It is not what you know, but whom you know,” applies only to people in other countries – like the Philippines – of today, think again. Such belief was also apparent in the nineteenth century.
For, despite Semmelweis’s pioneering handwashing in hospital, he lost his clinical appointment at Vienna General Hospital in 1850.
In that same year, without telling his doctor-friends, He returned to his country, Hungary, found work in another hospital where he advocated for clean hands. His idea, too, at the new hospital where he was taken, was downright rejected.
Semmelweis spent most of the years advocating for clean hands and met a stonewall of rejection by his fellow doctors who were unfocused on rigorous and scientific reasoning.
He went on to publish his finding in 1861. But it was immediately attacked by the medical community.
In 1865, at age 47, Semmelweis suffered a mental break down and was admitted in an asylum. Medical historians, instructors and health information officers up to this day argue as to what caused the mental breakdown of a gifted man who was somewhat difficult to converse with.
But recent claims now point out that Semmelweis suffered an early variant of Alzheimer’s disease.
He made his landmark discovery between 1846 and 1861, long before the medical profession was ready to accept it.
In the asylum, merely fourteen days after admission, a guard abused Dr. Semmelweis by beating him and Semmelweis suffered a wound in his hand – just like his good friend, Dr. Jakob Kolletschka.
His hand became infected with gangrene which was the cause of the death of Semmelweis – a brilliant doctor, whose theory was a discovery before his time.
Very ironic that both Semmelweis and Kolletschka died of the same cause: infection on the hand that Semmelweis had solved.
If many are to picture the image of Semmelweis nowadays, one can just turn to the looks of cheerful-looking man, balding a little bit, sporting a mustache, with a bow tie with not-so-much a protruding belly.
Years later, he was lionized world-wide as the “father of infection control” who revolutionized medicine with that singular discovery of handwashing.
More so, Semmelweis was mythologized as an archetypal Spartan warrior in Greek mythology who was overwhelmed and destroyed by forces beyond his control.
Today, in every school of medicine and public health, his name springs forth from medical teachers with great reverence whenever the topic of handwashing reverberates in the teaching walls of the classroom.
Truth of the matter was that his detractors long ago was very wrong and he was right, but he paid a heavy price for being right, even as he devoted his short, troubled life to pushing the boundaries of medical knowledge with his strong belief that “Unwashed hands can kill. “ —Bony A. Bengwayan
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