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The Physician who saw the Future (History)

Let's go down the memory lane and give credit to the physician who saw the need to wash our hands to get rid of germs. 

"Change may take awhile, but it will eventually happen". 

Ignaz Smmelweis was a physician from Hungary. While working in a hospital in Vienna he discovered that more patients in the maternity ward were having higher death rates from childbed fever. 

The world at the time believed that the fever was transmitted through poisonous gases in the air. Dr Semmelweis realised that the maternity ward was staffed by doctors who were also conducting autopsies and then delivering babies within the same day. 

In 1847, Dr Semmelweis attended an autopsy of a doctor who had died from blood poisoning who completed autopsies regularly, the doctor had cut himself with a scalpel that he used to dissect a body with. 

Dr Semmelweis noticed that the cut on his body matched the cuts on the body of the person he conducted an autopsy on. He concluded that the illness must have been transferred on the scalpel, not those poisonous gases in the air. 

After his analysis, Dr Semmelweis asked all staff to scrub their hands with calcium chloride before they touched patients. The mortality rate dried significantly.

Unfortunately for Dr Semmelweis, after he presented his work to the medical community, he was rejected and laughed at. 

He ended up falling into depression and had major mental health issues. In 1865, Dr Semmelweis was tricked into visiting an insane asylum. 

He died after 2 weeks of being there due to beaten and catching gangrene from a wound. 

Twenty years after his death, the medical community eventually adopted Dr Semmelweis's theory. 

Source: Weird History Facts.