In the mid-19th century, Vienna General Hospital was considered a world-class research center.

But the hospital's maternity ward didn't have such a good reputation.

Because it became known throughout the city of Vienna that if you went onto the doctor's

division or the doctor's clinic, you were much more likely to die.

That's Sherwin Nuland. He's a professor of medicine at Yale. He wrote a book called

The Doctors Plague about the situation at Vienna General Hospital. In the early 1840s,

one in ten women whose baby was delivered by a doctor there died from what was called

childbed fever. Childbed fever is an infection primarily of the uterus and it spreads out

through the tubes into the abdominal cavity of women immediately after they have given birth.

In 1847, one in six women died. And that was a year a young Hungarian-born doctor named

Ignat's Semelweiss joined the staff. He was horrified by the situation and he went digging

in the numbers for a clue. Now, here was something strange. There were two separate maternity

wards in the hospital. One staffed by doctors who were all male and the other by midwives

who were female. The death rate in the midwives ward was far lower. So was it a guy thing

that was causing all this death? One theory at the time held that birthing mothers were

such fragile creatures that being seen naked by a male doctor was enough to kill them.

Semelweiss didn't buy it. He also discovered that women who delivered their own babies on the

street had an even lower rate of childbed fever. In those days, it would occasionally happen that

women out of wet luck would deliver herself. Sometimes in the streets, the Germans had a word for it.

Gassen, Ghiburte, they were street births and he was hard put to find anybody who died

when a woman self delivered. And so Semelweiss came to suspect the likely cause of these

thousands of deaths, his fellow doctors. But how? The answer came in the form of a tragedy.

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