Think of a hospital. The smell of disinfectants fills the air, nurses in gloves rush from patient to patient, and doctors are seen at handwash stations in scrubs and masks. In a place where hygiene is clearly at the forefront, why do we talk of Hospital Acquired Infections?
In 1847, a Hungarian obstetrician, Dr. Ignatz Semmelweis noticed higher rates of death amongst mothers being treated by doctors and nurses than those treated by midwives. At the same time, he found that a pathologist who’d cut himself while doing an autopsy on a woman with sepsis (in the same hospital), had died of sepsis himself. He concluded that both infected hands and an infected scalpel could transmit infection. He then introduced chlorinated lime handwashing and found a massive reduction in death rates. While his theories were dismissed by the medical community at the time, we now know that what he discovered was real.
