Semmelweis, My Hero

Samuel Weiss was above all a scientist and a humanist. He wanted really to do everything for his patients. So when he discovered this terrible maternal mortality rate in the first ward, he really wanted as a mission to understand first, and then to solve the problem. That was his main mission. The guilt around the fact that at the time, physicians and medical students were actually killing mothers. This guilt pushed him to sort of tell everyone they were guilty. You are guilty, you are killing mothers if you don't wash your hands in that time, clean your hands if you like. The problem at the time is that, you know, the bosses, the head of the department didn't want to hear about that. It's true that he's described as a fanatic. It's true that he's described as somebody who didn't want to listen to others. But in another way, he needed to convince people that things were different. The more I'm discovering his life, the more he is my hero. The more I recognize the value of what he did and the strength that he needed to actually sort of be so persuasive and get his theory finally well accepted. If I could meet him today, I think I would tell him that the mothers all over the world are very grateful. It's true that we call Semmelweis the father of hand hygiene. Why? Because actually he introduced the most important infection control strategy. We can say also that he's the father of infection control because hand hygiene is so important of infection control, but not only that. He is the first, one of the first, who really described data as an epidemiology. So he's also, for me, used so much epidemiology that he's the father of hospital epidemiology. This Semmelweis Museum is quite unique. It's the house where Semmelweis was born, where he lived for several years. So it has a complete sort of meaning to the past, but also to the present of medicine and certainly to the future because it's very clear that good epidemiology, good infection control, and hand hygiene is there forever.