Ignaz semmelweis
Ignaz Semmelweis was born on 1 July 1818 in Tabán, neighbourhood of Buda, Hungary, today part of Budapest.
He was the fifth child out of ten of the prosperous grocer family of József Semmelweis and Teréz Müller.
nearly twenty years after his breakthrough, he was committed to an asylum.[where?] He died there of septicaemia only 14 days later, possibly as the result of being severely beaten by guards.
By his father met his mother and in 1810, he was a wealthy man and married Teréz Müller, daughter of the coach
His father was an ethnic German born in Kismarton, then part of Hungary, now Eisenstadt, Austria.
What he did ?
he was a Hungarian physician of ethnic-German ancestry
now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures.
Semmelweis was appointed assistant to Professor Johann Klein in the First Obstetrical Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital on July 1, 1846.
Later, after failing to obtain an appointment in a clinic for internal medicine, Semmelweis decided to specialize in obstetrics.
Ignaz Semmelweis began studying law at the University of Vienna in the autumn of 1837, but by the following year, for reasons that are no longer known, he had switched to medicine.
He was awarded his doctorate degree in medicine in 1844.
His duties were to examine patients each morning in preparation for the professor's rounds, supervise difficult deliveries, teach students of obstetrics and be "clerk" of records.
Child Bed Fever
Semmelweis demonstrated that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as childbed fever) could be drastically reduced by appropriate hand washing by medical care-givers. He made this discovery in 1847 while working in the Maternity Department of the Vienna Lying-in Hospital
While employed as assistant to the professor of the maternity clinic at the Vienna General Hospital in Austria in 1847, Semmelweis introduced hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions for interns who had performed autopsies.This immediately reduced the incidence of fatal puerperal fever from about 10% (range 5–30%) to about 1–2%. At the time, diseases were attributed to many different and unrelated causes.
Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, offering a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis's findings. He is considered a pioneer of antiseptic procedures.
Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time. The theory of diseases was highly influenced by ideas of an imbalance of the basic "four humours" in the body, a theory known as dyscrasia, for which the main treatment was bloodlettings.
Legacy
Semmelweis' advice on chlorine washings was probably more influential than he realized. Many doctors, particularly in Germany, appeared quite willing to experiment with the practical hand washing measures that he proposed, but virtually everyone rejected his basic and ground-breaking theoretical innovation — that the disease had only one cause, lack of cleanliness.
Only belatedly did his observational evidence gain wide acceptance; more than twenty years later, Louis Pasteur's work offered a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis' observations — the germ theory of disease. As such, the Semmelweis story is often used in university courses with epistemology content, e.g. philosophy of science courses—demonstrating the virtues of empiricism or positivism and providing a historical account of which types of knowledge count as scientific (and thus accepted) knowledge, and which do not.