DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 1847 · VIENNA
The doctors wash their hands
May 1847, the maternity wards of the Vienna General Hospital. A young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis has proved that a basin of chlorinated lime at the ward door cuts childbed-fever deaths from nearly one mother in five to almost none. In our timeline the profession mocked him and let him die unheard. This is the timeline where Vienna believes the basin.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
MAY 1847
March 1847. In the Vienna General Hospital, more mothers die in the doctors' ward than in the midwives' ward beside it, and no one can say why. The First Clinic is run by physicians who open the dead each morning. There childbed fever kills about one mother in ten. The Second Clinic is run by midwives who never touch a corpse. There it kills fewer than one in twenty-five. Women beg on their knees to be sent to the midwives. Some give birth in the street and come in afterward, because the open gutter is safer than the ward. Then a young Hungarian assistant, Ignaz Semmelweis, watches his friend Jakob Kolletschka die from the nick of a student's autopsy knife. The dead man's body shows the exact ruin of childbed fever. Semmelweis understands at last. His own profession carries death from the dissecting room on its hands. In mid-May he sets a basin of chlorinated lime at the ward door. Every hand must be scrubbed in it until the smell of the grave is gone.
In the timeline recorded here, the men who run Vienna's wards look at the basin of chlorinated lime, and they believe it.
The atlas keeps other pages near this one
