INTERESTING
Spring is an exciting time in New England. With the warmer days ahead, and the end to the bitter cold and snow, it can have us itching to get outside. However, Spring can also bring several issues such as seasonal allergies, asthma, the common cold and other respiratory/ airborne spread illnesses. To focus on the latter, we have all heard a great deal about keeping down the spread of illness with frequent and effective hygiene. Hand washing, hand washing, and more hand washing!
Hand washing has not always been a given, it actually was not known as an important practice until the mid 1800s. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, is widely recognized with the discovery of the importance of hand washing. Semmelweis was conducting a study in a maternity hospital. In this hospital there were physicians and medical students delivering newborns along with a group of midwives who also delivered newborns. Semmelweis began noticing that mothers and children had higher rates of fatality if delivered by a physician/medical student. While the mothers and children birthed by midwives had a much lower fatality rate. Semmelweis hypothesized over every variable as to why this was occurring. Until one day, a local pathologist died. The pathologist had contracted an illness from pricking his finger during an autopsy on a mother who had passed during childbirth. Also keep in mind gloves were not utilized at this time, and medical professionals of the day simply used their bare hands for all medical procedures, including autopsies. Semmelweis thought on this, and hypothesized that the pathologist passed from the same illness that his autopsy patient passed from. Meaning, that by some transmission, most likely the prick on his finger, the pathologist contracted the same illness. Later it was found that the pathologist had in fact passed from the same illness the mothers were dying from, known then as “childbed fever.”
“Childbed fever” at that time, was an illness exclusive to birthing mothers, so for a male pathologist to contract this illness and pass away was novel. Semmelweis kept thinking. He eventually concluded that the physicians and medical students also conducted autopsies, however, the midwives did not. So what if they were spreading childbed fever from the autopsy rooms/patients to the birthing mothers? Semmelweis implemented a new practice of hand washing and washing of medical instruments in chlorine after each use. To reduce the transmission of body matter from one person to another. This drastically decreased the physician and medical student fatality rates. However it would be many years and a struggle to get the rest of the medical community to agree with Semmelweis’s hand washing, many thought he was wrong. But hand washing prevailed! Thus, the practice of hand washing was given importance among the medical community. Though the idea of germs had not yet been discovered, the preliminary idea of having clean hands was understood to keep patients healthy. Fast forward to 2020, and Semmelweis’s discovery remains one of the best ways to discourage the spread of illness from one person to another. Which we know from current events is of the utmost importance not only for our health, but for those around us as well.
Davis, R. (2015). The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing And Briefly Saved Lives. National Public Radio.
Ignaz, S. (2008). The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed fever(excerpts). Social Medicine, 3(1). 4-12.
Markel H. (2015). Wash Your Hands!. The Milbank quarterly, 93(3), 447–454.
World Health Organization. (2009). Historical perspective on hand hygiene in health care. WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care: First Global Patient Safety Challenge Clean Care Is Safer Care, 4.
