# Semmelweis **URL:** \ **Category:** Lounge\ **Created:** [October 30, 2011, 4:12am UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/semmelweis/53071 "2011-10-30T04:12:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![PheroQuirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9e8a1a/32.png) [@PheroQuirk](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/PheroQuirk)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2011, 4:12am UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/semmelweis/53071/1 "2011-10-30T04:12:10Z")
> **[Ignaz Semmelweis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)** > > Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (.mw-parser-output .IPA-label-small{font-size:85%}.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-small{font-size:100%}German: \[ˈɪɡnaːts ˈfɪlɪp ˈzɛml̩vaɪs\]; Hungarian: Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp \[ˈsɛm(ː)ɛlvɛjs ˈiɡnaːts ˈfyløp\]; 1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian medical doctor and scientist of German descent who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures, known as the "saviour of m... > [@](#): > > Semmelweis’s 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 the hospital for political reasons and harassed by the medical community in Vienna, being eventually forced to move to Pest. > 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 in 1865 he was committed to an asylum. In an ironic twist of fate, he died there of septicaemia only 14 days later, possibly from the result of being severely beaten by guards. Semmelweis’s practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, offering a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis’s findings. He is considered a pioneer of antiseptic procedures. > … > Specifically, Semmelweis’s claims were thought to lack scientific basis, since he could offer no acceptable explanation for his findings. Such a scientific explanation was made possible only some decades later, when the germ theory of disease was developed by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others. > … > As accounts of the dramatic reduction in mortality rates in Vienna were being circulated throughout Europe, Semmelweis had reason to expect that the chlorine washings would be widely adopted, saving tens of thousands of lives. Early responses to his work also gave clear signs of coming trouble, however. Some physicians had clearly misinterpreted his claims. James Young Simpson, for instance, saw no difference between Semmelweis’s groundbreaking findings and the British idea suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1843 that childbed fever was contagious (i.e. that infected persons could pass the infection to others).[5]:10–12\* Indeed, initial responses to Semmelweis’s findings were that he had said nothing new.[5]:31\* > > In fact, Semmelweis was warning against all decaying organic matter, not just against a specific contagion that originated from victims of childbed fever themselves. This misunderstanding, and others like it, occurred partly because Semmelweis’s work was known only through secondhand reports written by his colleagues and students. At this crucial stage, Semmelweis himself had published nothing. These and similar misinterpretations would continue to cloud discussions of his work throughout the century.[7]:56 > … > Only belatedly did his observational evidence gain wide acceptance; more than twenty years later, Louis Pasteur’s work offered atheoretical explanation for Semmelweis’s observations—the germ theory of disease. As such, the Semmelweis story is often used in university courses with epistemology content, e.g. philosophy of science courses—demonstrating the virtues of empiricism or positivism and providing a historical account of which types of knowledge count as scientific (and thus accepted) knowledge, and which do not. It has been seen as an irony that Semmelweis’s critics considered themselves positivists, but even positivism suffers problems in the face of theories which seem magical or superstitious, such as the idea that “corpse particles” might turn a person into a corpse, with no causal mechanism being stipulated, after a simple contact. They could not accept Semmelweis’ ideas of minuscule and largely invisible amounts of decaying organic matter as a cause of every case of childbed fever— ideas which in the absence of a replicative biological mechanism, must have seemed no more chemically likely than homeopathy. To his contemporaries, Semmelweis seemed to be reverting to the speculative theories of earlier decades that were so repugnant to his positivist contemporaries.[5]:45 > The so-called Semmelweis reflex — a metaphor for a certain type of human behaviour characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms — is named after Semmelweis, whose perfectly reasonable hand-washing suggestions were ridiculed and rejected by his contemporaries. There is some uncertainty about the origin and generally accepted use of the expression.