Ignaz Semmelweis, Hungarian Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis, (born July 1, 1818, Buda, Hung., Austrian Empire—died August 13, 1865, Vienna, Austria), Hungarian-born Austrian physician. As an assistant at Vienna’s obstetric clinic at a time when death rates from puerperal fever were as high as 30% in European maternity hospitals, Semmelweis noticed that far fewer women died in the midwives’ division of the clinic than in the division where students (often coming from the dissecting room) were taught. Concluding that students carried the infection, he had them wash their hands in chlorinated lime before each exam, and mortality dropped from 18% to 1%. Though his ideas were accepted in Hungary, his Etiology, Understanding, and Preventing of Childbed Fever (1861) was widely rejected abroad, including by Rudolf Virchow.
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