Ignaz Semmelweis shows that handwashing prevents childbed fever

In 1847, at the Vienna General Hospital, the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that women died of puerperal fever far more often in the ward staffed by doctors and medical students, who also performed autopsies, than in the ward run by midwives. After a colleague died of an infection following a cut during an autopsy, he ordered doctors to wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution, and deaths in his ward fell from about 18 per cent to about 2 per cent. His colleagues rejected his findings, and he died in an asylum in 1865, before germ theory vindicated him.

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