In the 1840s, a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis started counting deaths in two maternity wards at Vienna General Hospital. Women in the ward run by doctors and medical students died at nearly five times the rate of the ward run by midwives. Then a colleague cut his finger during an autopsy and died of the same fever. Semmelweis put it together: the doctors were coming straight from autopsies to deliveries. He ordered his staff to clean their hands and instruments with a chlorine solution, and childbed fever dropped dramatically. You’d think everybody would cheer. They didn’t. Doctors didn’t like being told they were the problem, and Semmelweis eventually lost his job. He had the truth, but nobody wanted to hear it.
