“There is always a way to do it better. Find it. Nothing will ever be accomplished if all objections must first be overcome.”                  Thomas Edison

May 15, 1850 -Vienna, Austria: Hungarian-born Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis walked to the podium at the Vienna Medical Society lecture hall in Vienna. He was excited to be delivering the conference’s keynote address about his breakthrough discovery. Doctors waited in anticipation to hear Semmelweis’s presentation.

Semmelweis presented the results of a three-year study on the mortality rate of new mothers at the Vienna General Hospital. Specifically, he presented his findings on why so many women were dying of puerperal fever after childbirth. Semmelweis’s hypothesis was simple: “Doctors, wash your hands. It can save lives.”

To understand how Dr. Semmelweis reached his conclusion about hand washing, one must go back to 1846, the year he arrived at Vienna General Hospital and joined the maternity staff as an assistant professor. At the time, there were two maternity clinics, one where midwives assisted with labor and delivery and another where young medical interns performed these duties.

Semmelweis became alarmed that mothers were much more likely to die from puerperal fever, commonly known as childbed fever, in the doctors’ maternity ward than in the midwife ward, and he began to look for causes.

He observed that one difference between the midwife clinic and the doctors’ clinic was that mothers gave birth on their sides in the midwife’s clinic and on their backs in the doctors’ clinic. He implemented a new procedure in the doctor’s clinic for women to deliver on their sides, but the change did not affect the death rate.

Then Semmelweis noted that whenever a mother died in the doctor’s clinic, a priest would walk through the clinic ringing a bell. He wondered if the bell ringing was frightening the young mothers, causing them to get the fever. The bell-ringing practice was stopped, but it also failed to influence the death rate.

It wasn’t until a male hospital pathologist died from puerperal fever after pricking his finger during an autopsy that Semmelweis realized the fever did not occur only in birth mothers. Then he discovered that young interns were not only delivering babies, but they were also performing autopsies at a morgue adjacent to the hospital. The midwives were not involved in autopsies.

He watched a doctor perform an autopsy on a body that succumbed to childbed fever and then deliver a baby. Semmelweis wondered if minute tissue particles from the autopsy were being introduced into the mother’s birth canal during childbirth.

The young doctor tried unsuccessfully to stop interns from doing autopsies. He then asked the medical staff to start washing their hands and instruments in a chlorinated lime solution after autopsies, and before delivering babies. They reluctantly agreed. Over three years, Semmelweis discovered that the mortality rate from puerperal fever for women in the doctor’s clinic was five times lower than it had been before doctors started washing their hands.

Though the simple process of washing hands was a new idea for doctors, Dr. Semmelweis never expected the hostile reaction that he received. Many doctors in attendance thought his concept preposterous. They felt their profession was being unjustly accused of killing young mothers. His idea was rejected by the medical community in Vienna. They ostracized Semmelweis. He was eventually fired from his job, left Vienna, and returned to his home in Budapest, Hungary.

 It was not until 11 years later, in 1861, that Dr. Louis Pasteur validated Semmelweis’s hand-washing hypothesis. Through his research, he discovered the relationship between invisible microorganisms, commonly known as germs, and various diseases. Sadly, and tragically, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis would never know of Pasteur’s discovery.

After being fired from the Vienna hospital, Dr. Semmelweis arrived in Budapest humiliated and dejected about the indifference of the Vienna medical community. Over time, he grew angrier and more frustrated. He began writing letters to leading obstetric doctors in Europe, accusing them of murdering mothers. In 1865, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, one of the early pioneers of antiseptic procedures, died locked away in an asylum.

The phenomenon is known as the Semmelweis Reflex, and it describes the human tendency to reject new ideas or new knowledge that contradicts established beliefs or paradigms. New ideas, such as hand washing, are invariably subjected to the suspicion of people whose critical objections can kill a simple idea.

Inventor Henry Ford once said, “When you come up with a new idea be prepared for everyone telling you that you are crazy. If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It’s just their Semmelweis Reflex.