Sherwin Nuland - Ignaz Semmelweis and hand-washing (30/67)

I also wrote a few essays in the history of medicine, got very active in the history of medicine, which I've been intrigued by since I started medical school. We've got a wonderful historical library here, some great collections, one of the finest medical historical libraries, literally, in the world. I think probably the Countway in Boston has more. Maybe there's something in the National Archives, I don't know. But Yale would rank second, third, or fourth in the country in medical history, and it's a beautiful place to work, and I've done quite a bit of work there. And I got interested in the life of a fellow named Ignaz Semmelweis, who in the 1840s, I think it was 1847, discovered that if you wash your hands, if you're an obstetrician, you're not going to kill the mothers. The frequency of death in university hospitals in Europe was 15 to 18 percent, because the doctors were doing autopsies and examining women, and they were contaminating them, because no one knew anything about germs at that time. But he was a man who said, you've got to wash your hands in chlorine water, and that'll solve everything. And he was right, but he was also crazy and self-destructed at one point, just like I had. I became fascinated by his life, and I wrote an article for one of the medical history journals, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, that became sort of a talking point for a lot of historians, because I presented a point of view about his self-destruction. It was a new way of looking at him.