Hurting Healthy Students

Ignaz Semmelweis was an obstetrician at Vienna General—a teaching and research hospital—during the mid-19th century. While Semmelweis worked there, the mortality rate among women in the maternity ward grew to 10 percent. That means while other hospitals at the time had a .02 percent mortality rate in their maternity wards (one in fifty women died), at Vienna General, one in every ten women who delivered a baby there would die of childbed fever.

The symptoms of childbed fever included high fever and severe inflammation. This led to the use of leeches and other means of bloodletting in order to ease the inflammation. They also worked at improving ventilation to try to reduce the fevers. But nothing worked.

Women literally began delivering their babies in the alley of the hospital to avoid the maternity ward at Vienna General.

Semmelweis became obsessed with trying to solve the problem of this horrendously high mortality rate. He invited other doctors and midwives to help him look into the matter. He changed everything from their diets to the way they did the laundry to birthing positions, and to the way they ventilated the rooms in the hospital. Still nothing worked.

After exhausting every possible solution with no success, Semmelweis took a four-month leave of absence, at which time the mortality rate dropped significantly—to that of the other hospitals.

As a researcher and teacher, Semmelweis spent a lot of time studying and working on cadavers, but when women came to the hospital in labor, he would drop what he was working on to rush to their aid. Semmelweis finally came to the realization that it must be the minute particles from the cadavers that were making the women sick with childbed fever. From this conclusion, he instituted a hospital policy whereby doctors would be required to wash thoroughly in a solution of chlorine and lime before ever examining a patient.

The mortality rate at Vienna General immediately dropped to one in every one hundred (0.01%).

Semmelweis discovered that otherwise healthy patients could actually be infected by the dirty hands of the physicians that were treating them. There is a sense in which this could also potentially be true of teachers, who like Semmelweis, are unaware of the proverbial germs they are bringing to the classroom (and I’m not referring to C-19).

For further thoughts on this, read The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis.