Article: Semmelweis, Ignaz

SEMMELWEIS, IGNAZ

The Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 1865) graduated in medicine from Vienna in 1844. He then worked in the obstetric wards at the Allegemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna, where he was one of a generation of young medical men trained by the anatomical pathologist Karl von Rokitansky who sought to transform traditional but ineffective treatment methods by attacking difficult clinical problems with logic and mathematical precision. Semmelweis was particularly disturbed by the appalling death rate from puerperal sepsis, or childbed fever. The germ theory of disease was gaining ascendancy at that time, and Semmelweis reasoned that the women must be acquiring ...

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