Who and how first achieved success in the fight against bacteria, and how did it end for him? Detailed answer

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Who and how first achieved success in the fight against bacteria, and how did it end for him? Detailed answer

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Who and how first achieved success in the fight against bacteria, and how did it end for him?

The first successful attack on bacteria was made by the Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-1865). He drew attention to the fact that in the maternity ward of one of the Vienna hospitals in which he worked, more than 12 percent of women in labor died from puerperal fever (postpartum sepsis, blood infection), and in the neighboring maternity hospital, which was served by nuns, the mortality rate did not exceed 3 percent.

Semmelweis noticed that it was much cleaner there - the charter of the order prescribed strict personal hygiene for the nuns. In the city hospital, doctors operated in dirty gowns and, moreover, often came to patients directly from the anatomical theater. Semmelweis suspected that doctors and students were somehow bringing the disease into the delivery room and passing it on to women who were being assisted in childbirth. His suspicions were further strengthened when one of the hospital doctors, cut himself during the autopsy, died of an illness whose symptoms closely resembled those of puerperal fever.

In 1846, Semmelweis developed a method of dealing with postpartum sepsis - thorough washing of hands, followed by disinfection with bleach solution - and insisted on its use by doctors in the maternity ward. A year later, the death rate in the maternity ward had dropped to 1,5 percent. Despite this apparent success, Semmelweis' method was met with hostility by his conservative hospital colleagues. Viennese obstetricians were offended that they were considered the cause of the high mortality of women in childbirth, and the fact that they were forced to wash their hands was considered a direct insult.

Semmelweis had to leave Vienna and go to Budapest. Applying his method there, he sharply reduced the death rate in the wards of women in labor. And in Vienna, everything went on as before: mortality in maternity wards returned to its original level. Semmelweis almost did not live to see the day when his suspicions about the mechanism of transmission of the disease were scientifically proven thanks to the discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister.

In Budapest, in 1906, a monument to Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was erected with the inscription: "The Savior of Mothers."

Author: Kondrashov A.P.

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