Ignaz Semmelweis

Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician, born in Buda in 1818 and died in Vienna in 1865. Working at Vienna General Hospital in 1847, he noticed that a maternity ward staffed by doctors and medical students, who often came straight from autopsies, had a childbed fever death rate several times higher than a nearby ward staffed by midwives, who did not perform autopsies. He ordered doctors to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution between the autopsy room and the maternity ward, and the death rate fell sharply, an early controlled comparison built on ordinary hospital record-keeping rather than a designed experiment. His explanation, that some kind of invisible cadaverous matter was being carried on unwashed hands, was rejected by most of the era's medical establishment, in part because no accepted germ theory yet existed to explain it; he was committed to an asylum in 1865 and died there weeks later, and his work was only widely credited after germ theory, minted this atlas's own theory entry, was established decades on.