Ignaz Semmelweiss: The hand washer

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lindsey Fitzharris tells the story of Ignaz Semmelweiss, the hand washer. In a world that had no understanding of germs, he tried to apply science to halt the spread of infection. Ignaz Semmelweis observed that many young medical students at his hospital in Vienna went directly from an autopsy, still covered in contaminated dead flesh, to attend pregnant women. Could this be the reason for such high maternal mortality rates from conditions like puerperal fever? Believing that the disease was caused by “infective material” from a dead body, Semmelweiss set up a basin filled with chlorinated lime solution in his hospital and began saving women’s lives with three simple words: ‘wash your hands’. He was demonised by his colleagues for his efforts, but today, he is known as the “Saviour of Mothers.” Lindsey Fitzharris discusses some of the common myths surrounding the story of Semmelweiss with Dr Barron H. Lerner of New York University Langone School of Medicine. And she talks to Professor Val Curtis, Director of the Environmental Health Group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who has studied the amount of hand washing by medical staff in hospitals today. Picture: Victorian boy washing his hands in a stream, Credit: whitemay

Transcript

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0:40.0	I'm Philip Ball and today on Discovery from the BBC I'm here with another story from the
0:46.4	history of science. Today Lindsay Fitz Harris tells the story of Ignat's Semmelvise.
0:54.0	Who will buy my sweetbread roses?
0:58.0	The calls of street vendors along with the laughter of children playing just beyond the walls of a Victorian hospital
1:08.0	often mass the horror going on within.
1:11.0	Today, we think of the hospital as an exemplar of sanitation, however they
1:16.5	were anything but. In 1825 visitors to St. George's in London discovered mushrooms and maggots thriving in the damp dirty sheets of a patient recovering from a compound fracture.
1:30.0	The afflicted man, believing this to be the norm, had not complained about the conditions,
1:35.0	nor had any of his fellow bedmates thought the squaller especially noteworthy.
1:39.6	Those unlucky enough to be admitted to this and other hospitals of the era were
1:43.8	nerd to the horrors that resided within. Hospitals reeked of urine, vomit, and
1:49.4	other bodily fluids. The smell was so offensive that the staff sometimes walked around with
1:54.6	handkerchiefs pressed to their noses. Doctors didn't exactly smell like rose beds either.
	...

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