Semmelweis, Ignaz Philipp, 1818-65, Hungarian physician. He was a pioneer in employing asepsis. While on the staff of the general hospital in Vienna, he recognized the infectious nature of puerperal fever and insisted that attendants in obstetrical cases thoroughly cleanse their hands; he thus greatly reduced the mortality rate from infection in childbirth. Ridicule of his belief caused him to leave Vienna (1854) for Pest, Hungary, and ultimately drove him to insanity and suicide. He recorded his results in The Cause, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever (1861, tr. 1941), but the value of his work was not fully recognized until c.1890.

Hungarian Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis

(born July 1, 1818, Buda, Hung., Austrian Empire—died August 13, 1865, Vienna, Austria) Hungarian-born Austrian physician. As an assistant at Vienna's obstetric clinic at a time when death rates from puerperal fever were as high as 30percnt in European maternity hospitals, Semmelweis noticed that far fewer women died in the midwives' division of the clinic than in the division where students (often coming from the dissecting room) were taught. Concluding that students carried the infection, he had them wash their hands in chlorinated lime before each exam, and mortality dropped from 18percnt to 1percnt. Though his ideas were accepted in Hungary, his Etiology, Understanding, and Preventing of Childbed Fever (1861) was widely rejected abroad, including by Rudolf Virchow.

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