Am I Ignaz Semmelweis?

As I was preparing my original grievance, that's the one with the dodgy investigation and no appeal, this was part of an episode of that excellent programme QI.

I can certainly understand why he went mad

Q.I.

Friday 17^th December 2010, 20.30

Rob Brydon        For a long time doctors and surgeons didn’t realise that it was actually very important to wash your hands before you operate, because they weren’t aware of the transference of germs and it was Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian, and he came up with this theory because he was at the Vienna Infirmary. He started this whole idea of the importance of cleanliness and hygiene.

Steven Fry          You’re absolutely right, there’s a museum in Budapest, to which I’ve been, called the Semmelweis Museum, which is where he lived. He died in poverty and insanity. In fact he died in an insane asylum because no-one recognised the absolute truth of what he said.

Alan Davies        So obsessively clean hands actually drive you mad

Steven Fry          No, what drives you mad is telling the truth and having no-one believe you. You see Doctors couldn’t face the fact that he was basically saying that thousands and thousands of deaths that took place in Hospitals were ultimately the fault of Doctors.

http://www.squidoo.com/ignaz-semmelweis  Source: Wikipedia. Ignaz Semmelweis

While working at the Vienna General Hospital in Austria, Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions reduced the incidence of fatal puerperal fever from about 10 percent (range 5-30 percent) to about 1-2 percent. At the time, diseases were attributed to many different and unrelated causes. Each case was considered unique, just like a human person is unique. Semmelweis' hypothesis, that there was only one cause, that all that mattered was cleanliness, was extreme at the time, and was largely ignored, rejected or ridiculed. He was dismissed from hospital and had difficulty finding employment as a medical doctor.Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of the medical profession and began writing open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times denouncing them as irresponsible murderers. His contemporaries, including his wife, believed he was losing his mind and he was in 1865 committed to an asylum (mental institution). Semmelweis died there only 14 days later, possibly after being severely beaten by guards.

Facebook - Ignaz Philipp Semmelweiss (July 1, 1818 – August 13, 1865; in Hungarian Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp or slightly "internationalized" Ignac Semmelweiss), was a Hungarian physician described as the "savior of mothers", who discovered by 1847 that the incidence of puerperal fever could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection (by means of hand washing with chlorinated lime solution) in obstetrical clinics. Puerperal fever (or childbed fever) was common in mid-19th-century hospitals and often fatal, with mortality at 10%–35%. Semmelweis postulated the theory of washing with "chlorinated lime solutions" in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards. He published a book of his findings in childbed fever in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.
Despite various publications of results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory. In 1865, a nervous breakdown (or possibly Alzheimer's) landed him in an asylum, where Semmelweis ironically died of septicemia, at age 47.