He insisted upon the use of chlorinated lime solutions for handwashing by medical students and doctors before they treated obstetrical patients. The application of his method instantly reduced the cases of fatal puerperal fever from Besides the hands, he initiated using preventive washing for all instruments making contact with the patients which literally removed puerperal fever from the hospital.
This was the beginning of an antiseptic era. Although hugely successful; Semmelweis' discovery directly confronted with the beliefs of science and medicine in his time. His colleagues and other medical professionals refused to accept his findings mainly because they did not find it convincing that they could be responsible for spreading infections. The reaction reflected on his job as well when he was declined a reappointment in Ignaz Semmelweis was himself reluctant to publish or demonstrate his research and findings publically but some of his students and colleagues wrote letters and delivered lectures explaining his work.
But later, he somehow got convinced and during , he delivered a few lectures in Vienna on the Origin of Puerperal Fever. He returned to Budapest in and joined St. Rochus Hospital remaining there till His antiseptic methods proved to be fruitful here as well. In , he eventually published a book in German about his significant discovery followed by a series of letters written in reaction to his critics. The continued criticism and lash out finally broke him down.
By , he was suffering from depression, forgetfulness and other neural complaints and was eventually committed to an asylum. He only lasted there for two weeks and died on August 13, at the age of The conviction that such a time must inevitably sooner or later arrive will cheer my dying hour. Semmelweis' Germ Theory.
Retrieved Nov 13, from Explorable. The text in this article is licensed under the Creative Commons-License Attribution 4. That is it. You can use it freely with some kind of link , and we're also okay with people reprinting in publications like books, blogs, newsletters, course-material, papers, wikipedia and presentations with clear attribution. Wikipedia on Semmelweis' Germ Theory.
Menu Search. Fortunately, Dr. Semmelweis was smart enough to listen to his patients. That morbid poison is now known as the bacteria called Group A hemolytic streptococcus. Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria, seen through a microscope, the cause of puerperal fever.
That said, it was Dr. Semmelweis who ordered his medical students and junior physicians to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution until the smell of the putrid bodies they dissected in the autopsy suite was no longer detectable.
Soon after instituting this protocol in , the mortality rates on the doctor-dominated obstetrics service plummeted. Consequently, Semmelweis met with enormous resistance and criticism. Such outbursts, no matter how well deserved, never go unnoticed, let alone unpunished, in the staid halls of academic medicine.
He died there, two weeks later, on Aug. Some point to an operation Semmelweis performed, wherein he infected himself with syphilis, which may also explain his insanity. Others believe he developed blood poisoning and sepsis while imprisoned in the asylum for what may have been an unbridled case of bipolar disease.
He made his landmark discovery between and , long before the medical profession was ready to accept it. Although Louis Pasteur began exploring the role of bacteria and fermentation in spoiling wine during the late s, much of his most important work initiating the germ theory of disease occurred between and A few years later, in , the Scottish surgeon Joseph Lister , who apparently had never heard of Semmelweis, elaborated the theory and practice of antiseptic surgery, which included washing the hands with carbolic acid to prevent infection.
And in , the German physician Robert Koch successfully linked a germ, Bacillus anthracis, to a specific infectious disease, anthrax. Today, in every school of medicine and public health, his name is uttered with great reverence whenever the critical topic of hand washing is taught. Sadly, in real time, he was derided as eccentric at best and, at worst, as an angry, unstable man who ought to be drummed out of the profession.
The real truth of the matter is that his detractors were wrong and he was right. Semmelweis paid a heavy price as he devoted his short, troubled life to pushing the boundaries of knowledge in the noble quest to save lives. Because of the similarities, Semmelweis inferred that the medical students in the First Obstetric Clinic, who also dissected cadavers at the morgue, were transferring cadaverous material from the morgue to maternity patients via their hands, causing puerperal fever.
The students transferred the material to the women in the maternity clinic as they examined them. The midwives that ran the Second Obstetrical Clinic did not work in the morgue and therefore were not transferring the cadaverous material to their maternity patients. In , after finding the correlation between cadaverous materials and puerperal fever, Semmelweis posted notices in the First Obstetrical Clinic that required all medical staff to examine their hands between examinations and wash them with a chloride solution, a bleaching agent, and a disinfectant.
Semmelweis used a chloride solution, because at the time practitioners used it to get rid of odors, and he hypothesized that the solution would also destroy the cadaverous materials that carried a foul odor. Disinfectants are chemical liquids that destroy bacteria. At the time, medical staff rarely used disinfectants like a chloride solution because no one had had established the existence of germs.
Semmelweis hypothesized that the solution was destroying the cadaverous material, which was true, but it was also destroying the bacteria on the cadaverous material. Semmelweis's chloride solution, although harsh for human skin, reduced the rate of puerperal fever in his hospital. After Semmelweis mandated that doctors wash their hands in between procedures, the death rate from puerperal fever dropped to approximately two percent, and continued to fall.
Klein attributed the drop in puerperal fever to a ventilation system that had been added to the hospital around the same time. Ferdinand von Hebra, editor of a medical journal in Austria and a friend of Semmelweis's from medical school, reported Semmelweis's results with the chlorinated lime solution in December and again in April However, scientists in Austria did not adopt Semmelweis's conclusions, as it contrasted with established medical theories of the time.
Many doctors in the early to mid s argued that diseases resulted from imbalances among four humors, which they postulated to exist in all human bodies, and that each disease was unique because each person was unique. The said that a healthy person had a perfect balance of the four humors of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Semmelweis's findings that all puerperal cases resulted from unhygienic practices contrasted with the theory of humors.
Austrian physicians dismissed his work, and historians have argued that Semmelweis's Jewish and Hungarian origins contributed to the dismissal. Physicians elsewhere in Europe, including James Young Simpson, a doctor in Scotland who discovered the antiseptic components of chloroform, stated that Semmelweis's conclusions were similar to those of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
In , Holmes had published an essay about the contagious aspect of puerperal fever. Although there are similarities between some of the work of Holmes and of Semmelweis, only the latter developed a theory as to the cause of the contagiousness and a method to prevent puerperal fever. In , as Semmelweis implemented his program involving chloride solution in the Vienna General Hospital , political revolutions erupted throughout Europe, including Semmelweis's home country of Hungary. When Semmelweis applied for an extension to continue his work at the Vienna General Hospital , Klein did not grant it, despite Semmelweis being the choice of most of the medical faculty.
Klein said that Semmelweis was a sympathizer of the revolution in Hungary. Without a job, Semmelweis left Vienna and returned to Pest, Hungary. In Pest, Semmelweis continued to implement his hand washing procedures. The hospital had a high rate of puerperal fever, but with Semmelweis heading the hospital and implementing his policies, the rate of puerperal fever plummetted. In , Semmelweis became head of obstetrics at the University of Pest. There, Semmelweis implemented the chlorine washing procedure and infection rates of puerperal fever at the university hospital fell.
In , Semmelweis married Maria Weidenhoffer, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Together, they had five children. Throughout the s, Semmelweis wrote papers on puerperal fever and, in , he published his book Die aetiologie, der begriff und die prophylaxis des kindbettfiebers The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. Semmelweis's mental health began to deteriorate after the publication of his book and he suffered from severe depression.
0コメント