The Life Saving History of Hand Washing | Told by Max Brooks | History at Home

Hi, I'm Max Brooks, and today I'm going to talk to you about the man who taught us all to wash our hands. His name was Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, and in the mid-19th century, Dr. Semmelweis was practicing medicine at a teaching hospital, which was suffering from something called childbed fever. And childbed fever meant that perfectly healthy moms were giving birth to perfectly healthy babies, but then the moms were coming down with this horrible infection, and nobody could figure out why. Now back then, germ theory, the idea that microbes make us sick, that was brand new, and it hadn't made its way to Vienna yet. But they did know that disease could be transferred. But in this case, they couldn't figure out where the transference was coming from, especially in Dr. Semmelweis's hospital, because it had two separate clinics. Now clinic number one had student doctors, and childbed fever was crazy. But in clinic number two, you had student midwives. Not a lot of childbed fever. So what was the difference? And Dr. Semmelweis just tried so hard to figure it out, and he looked at all the different aspects of the two clinics. Was it overcrowding? Was it medicine? He couldn't understand until a friend of his was doing an autopsy in clinic number one. Now an autopsy is when a person dies, doctors cut open their bodies and look inside and see how they died. And it's just really gross and disgusting and gross. And while this doctor was doing it, he cut himself on one of the knives and then came down with childbed fever. And then Dr. Semmelweis understood. The disease was going from the autopsies to the healthy patients on the hands of the doctors, because the doctors weren't washing their hands, because nobody washed their hands at the time. It just wasn't done. In fact, doctors even had this stupid macho phrase called the good old stink of surgery. Seriously, that's how they used to talk. They'd be like, hey, Bob, how was your surgery today? Mm, it was good. My hands smell like a rotten pig that's been sitting in the sun for three days. Hey, let's go deliver a baby. That's how doctors were. And Semmelweis was like, no, no, you have to stop this. You have to wash your hands thoroughly with chemicals before you get anywhere near a healthy patient. And it worked. Semmelweis instituted mandatory hand washing policy at his hospital. And childbed fever went right down. But the problem is, whenever you're the first to discover something, it usually takes a while for people to believe you. And that was the case with Semmelweis. Doctors laughed at him, and they thought he was crazy. So crazy, they actually put him in a mental hospital where he ended up dying of an infection. But the world did catch up eventually. And we all realized how important it was to be hygienic. And so countless lives were saved, including ours, by the simple act of washing our hands.