I recently read Sherwin Nuland's The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (2003).
I had heard the basics--Semmelweis was the guy who figured out that doctors were causing childbed (puerperal) fever by poking their dirty hands into the vaginal canals of women whose babies they were helping ("helping") to deliver. But even though Semmelweis was right, no one wanted to listen to him, and it was decades before handwashing became routine in medicine, and poor Semmelweis died in a madhouse.
This story has circulated a lot since 2020, because of the obvious analogy of supposed experts refusing to accept that SARS-CoV-2 is aerosolized, airborne, and that to prevent transmission it isn't enough to wash your hands (though that's still a good practice) or stand six feet apart or wear a baggy cloth or surgical mask.
Nuland's version confirms the summary, but the details are fascinating, and the story well told.
Doctors, of course, did not want to accept that they were actively killing their patients, even though women who delivered in the doctors' wards in the hospital were far, far more likely to die than those who delivered at home, or in the midwife wards, or even in the street on the way to the hospital.
There were tensions between different theories of disease (the prior explanations of childbed fever sound ridiculous now, but there were theories behind them, and institutional investments in those theories). Semmelweis was an outsider--a Hungarian in Vienna, a German speaker in Hungary. He was also impolitic, rude, and a bad writer. He failed to carry out experiments that would confirm his theory, and failed to engage with the hospital's microscopist to get a look at the 'cadaver particles' he speculated doctors were carrying from the autopsies they did in the mornings to the examinations and deliveries they did in the afternoons. He hated writing and didn't want to bother to publish his theory, so his opponents beat him into print with misrepresentations of his account. When he did finally write up his theory, the text was digressive, repetitive, bombastically phrased, and full of cranky attacks on his medical rivals (reminds me a little of Anthony Leonardi--correct on the science but tetchy with those who aren't on board).
Nuland speculates, based on available records including Semmelweis's autopsy, that he suffered early-onset Alzheimer’s, that he was badly beaten by attendants in the insane asylum where he spent his last weeks, and that as a result he died of sepsis--essentially the same disease he tried to save his patients from.
The work of Pasteur later provided the germ theory that supported Semmelweis's observations, and Joseph Lister developed theories and practices of antisepsis and asepsis. But even Lister, who was, in Nuland's account, a suave, classy, diligent scientist, who did repeated experiments to confirm his theories, and published and spoke about his work extensively and persuasively, still took about 20 years to win over the bulk of the medical profession.
Anyway, wash your hands, and wear a respirator.
#CovidIsAirborne
#SemmelweisWasRight
#MaskUp
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