Contemporary reaction to Ignaz Semmelweis

Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that hand-wash with a solution of chlorinated lime reduced the incidence of fatal childbed fever tenfold in maternity institutions.

The failure of the nineteenth-century scientific community to recognize Semmelweis's findings, and the nature of the flawed critiques outlined below, helped advance a positivist epistemology, leading to the emergence of evidence-based medicine.

[citation needed] Semmelweis's key claim was that physicians contaminated their hands with "cadaveric particles" in the morgue while conducting autopsies.

When physicians later carried out gynaecological examinations, the cadaveric particles were absorbed by the patient, in particular if they came into contact with the freshly exposed uterus, or with genital tract lesions caused by the birth process.

A few childbed fever case stories, described below, did not fit well into Semmelweis's theory and led him to expand it, also to comprise other types of decaying organic matter, for instance secretions from an infected knee or from a cancer tumor.

[2]And in a case of a discharging carious knee, he wrote: A new tragic experience persuaded me that air could also carry decaying organic matter.

He therefore suggested that self-infection took place - that internally generated cadaveric particles were responsible, for instance tissue crushed in the birth process and eventually turning gangrenous.

The purpose of quoting the Levy paper was that it demonstrated the nature of the criticism, in particular the intricate theoretical reasoning that completely overshadowed Semmelweis' experimental results.