Professional pride and personal tragedy stymied ideas about how infections spread in the nineteenth century, suggests a show about maverick Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis.
and German physician Robert Koch, who made their discoveries between the 1860s and 1880s, he is barely given a footnote in the history of antiseptic procedures and the germ theory of disease., a fascinating play produced by the UK National Theatre, and created by the writer Stephen Brown with the actor Mark Rylance, who plays Semmelweis.
Realizing this is the only difference, Semmelweis requires that all those entering the obstetric ward wash their hands in a chlorine solution. The death rate plummets to less than 3%. He wonders why, concluding that ‘cadaveric particles’ must pass from the corpses to the women’s bodies and cause infection. When he traces a further outbreak of childbed fever to a woman in the ward with an infected knee, he changes his description of the infectious agent to ‘decaying organic matter’.
Klein fires Semmelweis, who returns to Budapest in 1849. A final effort to present his ideas at a public conference ends in disaster when he calls his critics murderers, and his life soon reaches its end. He dies — of sepsis, ironically — in a psychiatric hospital at the age of 47.
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