The story of a man whose ideas could have saved a lot of lives

The year was 1846 and our would-be hero was a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis. Semmelweis was a man of his time, according to Justin Lessler, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. It was a time Lessler describes as "the start of the golden age of the physician scientist," when physicians were expected to have scientific training. So doctors like Semmelweis were no longer thinking of illness as an imbalance caused by bad air or evil spirits. They looked instead to anatomy. Autopsies became more common and doctors got interested in numbers and collecting data. The young doctor Semmelweis was no exception. When he showed up for his new job in the maternity clinic at the General Hospital in Vienna, he started collecting some data of his own. Semmelweis wanted to figure out why so many women in maternity wards were dying from puerperal fever - commonly known as childbed fever. He studied two maternity wards in the hospital -– one was staffed by all male doctors and medical students and the other was staffed by female midwives. And he counted the number of deaths on each ward. When Semmelweis crunched the numbers he discovered that women in the clinic staffed by doctors and medical students died at a rate nearly five times higher than women in the midwives' clinic. But why?
Semmelweis went through the differences between the two wards and started ruling out ideas.