고등학교 영어Ⅱ (YBM 박준언) 연계 글

In the 1840s, the General Hospital of Vienna ran one of Europe's largest maternity departments, yet many women who gave birth there never returned home. They died of childbed fever, an infection that was especially common in hospitals. At the time, such deaths were widely believed to have been caused by "bad air" or by an imbalance of the body's fluids.

During that decade, a young Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, became an assistant in one of the hospital's two maternity wards. What struck him was that mothers in his ward died of the fever more than twice as often as those in the other ward. What set the wards apart was that midwives delivered the babies in one, while doctors and medical students, who also dissected corpses nearby, delivered them in his.

The clue came in 1847, when his colleague Jakob Kolletschka died after he was accidentally wounded during an autopsy. Kolletschka's illness appeared to have been very similar to the fever that was killing the mothers. Semmelweis concluded that tiny particles from corpses were traveling on the hands of doctors and students to the women they examined. In May of that year, he ordered the doctors and students to scrub their hands with chlorinated lime, a powerful cleaning chemical, after their work in the autopsy room.

Deaths in his ward fell sharply almost at once. Yet this success did not win over many of Vienna's senior physicians. What many of them could not accept was that their own hands might be carrying death to the women in their care. Others found the chlorine solution hard on the skin and thought the new routine took too much time. Semmelweis did little to persuade them, for he imposed the rule without asking his colleagues for their views.

His position in Vienna was not renewed, and he returned to Hungary. When his book on childbed fever finally appeared in 1861, most experts still rejected his ideas, and he answered his critics in harsh open letters. He died in 1865, years before the germ theory of disease, which holds that tiny living organisms cause many illnesses, was widely accepted. That theory finally explained why his method had worked, and Semmelweis is now considered to have laid the foundation of modern infection control. What his story shows is that strong evidence can still be ignored when it challenges what experts already believe.