Abstract
Born at Buda (now Budapest) on 1 July 1818, Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis (Figure 1) read law at Pest before studying medicine in Vienna where he graduated in 1844. He became an assistant at the First Obstetric Clinic of the University. Puerperal infection was then rampant in European maternity hospitals and caused many maternal deaths. Despite the objections of his chief, Johann Klein (1788–1856), Semmelweis investigated its cause. He found the death rate much higher in wards frequented by medical students than in those where midwives were trained. He concluded that students transferred something from the dissecting room to the labour ward and so he made them wash their hands in chlorinated lime before each examination. The mortality rate dropped from 18% to just over one. The young medical men in Vienna recognized the significance of Semmelweis's discovery; Klein was unimpressed.
The Semmelweis Memorial, by Alajos Stróbl, in Budapest
Semmelweis, a Hungarian wishing for Hungarian independence, participated in a minor revolution in Vienna in March 1848. His political activities probably contributed to the loss of his post at the clinic in 1849 and to the rejection of his application to the University for a Teaching Post in midwifery. Following his lecture on ‘The Origin of Puerperal Fever’ at Vienna's Medical Society he applied again for a teaching post; he was offered it, but with restrictions he considered humiliating – he was not allowed to teach on a patient or a cadaver, only on a phantom.
Semmelweis left Vienna in 1850 and returned to Pest where he worked for six years at St. Rochus Hospital. When puerperal fever broke out he took charge of the midwifery department and the mortality rate fell to under 1%; in Prague and Vienna it was still 10–15%.
Appointed Professor of Obstetrics in Pest in 1855, he married in 1857 and had five children. Despite the publication in 1861 of his great work, Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers, many authorities still rejected his teachings although in 1862 Hungary's government ordered all district authorities to introduce Semmelweis' methods. The controversy eventually took its toll. In 1865 he was admitted to a mental hospital where he soon died. Ironically, his death was caused by the infection of a wound on his right hand, apparently the result of an operation performed before he was taken ill. He died of the disease against which he had struggled all his professional life.
This statue is in Erzsebét Square, Budapest. There are also statues of Semmelweis in Vienna, in Heidelberg, and in the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago.