Ignaz Semmelweis Quotes

Semmelweis reflex: The tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms

In the mid-1800s, Dr. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis noticed that new mothers who were treated by midwives fared much better than those who were treated by trainee doctors, who also handled and dissected cadavers. He believed that sticking one’s hands into a dead body and then directly into a laboring woman was dangerous. So, Semmelweis issued a mandate that hands must be washed between the two activities. And it worked! Rates of infection dropped from one in ten to one in a hundred within the first few months. Unfortunately, the finding was rejected by much of the medical establishment of the time. One of the reasons it was so hard to get doctors to wash up? The stench of “hospital odor” on their hands was a mark of prestige. They called it “good old hospital stink.” Quite simply, decayed corpse smell was a badge of honor they had no intention of removing.

A figure who was much reviled in his own time but whose speculations and medical practice also paved the way for the germ theory was the Hungarian gynecologist Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818–1865). In the 1840s, working at the Vienna General Hospital, Semmelweis was appalled by the rate of maternal mortality from puerperal fever, now known to be a severe bacterial blood infection and then the leading cause of death in lying-in hospitals.

When the Viennese doctor Ignaz Semmelweis insisted that delivery room doctors and medical students wash their hands before attending their patients, he was ridiculed, even though the practice dramatically reduced death from puerperal sepsis. In 1865, when Semmelweis died, his simple but radical idea was still discounted.

The tragic case of Ignaz Semmelweis highlights that it is not sufficient for a mental frame to improve decision-making. For a frame to catch on, it also has to offer a convincing causal explanation.