SAFER MOTHERHOOD

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 December 1939, Page 10

SAFER MOTHERHOOD

HUNGARIAN’S . GREAT WORK A man to whom every mother has reason to be profoundly grateful today is an Hungarian named Semmelweis, Why? Because, afire to find a safe way to help mothers have their babies, he set to work and succeeded. Others have been responsible for further discoveries that have made the business of motherhood as safe as it is to-day, but Semmelweis was the pioneer whose early work was of incalculable value.

Semmelweis proved—long before men like I-'asteur and Lister —that death is not always generated inside our bodies, but can enter us from without- For the first .time in human record he proved how certain deaths can be kept out of us. -Years before Robert Koch finally showed that microbes can be murderers, Semmelweis devised a simple trick to scotch tfie attack of certain of these subvisible assassins of whose very existence he was ignorant.

It is nearly a hundred years ago since this Hungarian showed the way to fight these microbes. Like many other students who to-day are hailed as benefactors of mankind, he was made to suffer for his new theories. He was actually discharged from his job in Vienna for making his mothersaving discovery. His trouble was that lie was too forthright and honestEven when he had gone back to his home town, Budapest, and proved his trick of keeping this death away from mothers, all over Europe obstetrical men kept decrying him —and, all over Europe, young mothers in the bloom of youth went on dying needlessly.

At last Semmelweis wrote his marvellous, hhlf-mad masterpiece, now forgotten, that roared at the doctors cf Europe: ‘The murder must stop!” Then they began to listen. Before he reached voting age Semmelweiss showed what a bull-headed young man he was. Baptised with the name of Ignaz, he had been sent to Vienna to study law by his father, a Budapest merchant, in 1837. One chance visit to an anatomy demonstration with a medical student friend made Ignaz throw his law book out of the window and begin the study of medicine.

His early student life was a gay one, and, incidentally, his friends shortened his name to Nazi. They said he would come to no good end, but he contradicted all that by choosing the then most tragic of all medical specialities—obstetrics.

Gaining his IVI.D. degree, he began helping mothers to have their babies in the notorious First Maternity Division of the Vienna General Hospital in April, 1844. In that, month and in that division, 36 out of 208 mothers died —of childhood fever. Having a baby there was almost, as dangerous as having the worst form of pneumonia. Among tlie frock-coated professors and their sycophantic assistants Semmelweis was unique. They all thought he was peculiar because he could not get used to those young women eying.

During the next two years, 184 1 to JBl6, Semmelweis’watched them die in 1-[inches. His chief, Professeor Klein, go!, over it. But not Semmelweis. If worried him more and more, and he kept, bothering old Klein with what seemed like silly questions. The professor agreed that it would have been good to see more of these young women live to enjoy their babies. But

what was there to be done? Me had taught Semmelweis what be himself I had been taught—that it was an invisI ible miasm that killed these mothers. ’lt was an unknown epidemic, which could 1 not be fought. The greatest

doctors of the. time simply accepted it. ’ ,

Then Semmelweis discovered one little fact which reduced this theory of. childbed fever to nonsense. Here in the First Maternity Division 451 women had died in one year. Next door —in the same home —was the Second Maternity Division, with deaths five times fewer. If this miasm pervaded everything, why did it not pervade the Second Maternity Division ? Women used to tight to avoid being confined in the First' Division. It was they who told Semmelweis that ward whence, the chances were, they would not return. Meanwhile Semmelweis worked. He slaved all day and' late at night, probing, testing, and examining to try to discover the reason for this puzzle which no one had ever solved.

His research, his questions, brought only disaster to himself. He was sacked, and his job was given to a man who asked fewer questionsSemmelweis spent that whole Winter learning English, planning to go to England and Dublin, to find out.why it was they had so much less childbed fever in the hospitals there. THE DISCOVERY. But he got his job back, and within a week he was put on the right track. His friend, the pathologist, Kolletschka, had just been buried—dead from blood poisoning through a careless student sticking him with a knife at an autopsy. Blood poisoning? What else but blood poisoning was childbed fever? And the practice had often been tor doctors who had just performed autopsies to atend maternity cases. With invisible cadaver poison on their hands the doctors had atended these mothers. He himself had killed them. The truth burst upon him; the answer to the question: “Why was the Second Maternity Division safer?” It was because midwives worked there, and they did not perform autopsies.

Semmelweis introduced' a. new system of disinfecting the hands after autopsies. Following the usual washing with soap and water, chlorine water was used. In April 18 out of every 100 mothers had died. Semmelweis started the chlorine washing at the end of May. In June the death-

rate had decreased' to just a little over two per 100.' In July only one in 100 died. This was actually less than the number of deaths in the safe Second Division.

Semmelweis was not hailed as a' benefactor, as he should have been. I On the contrary. He had committed the cardinal sin of upsetting years and years of accepted teaching; he bad rendered stacks of text-books valueless; and —the worst crime of all —had l proved a lot of august professors to be so many ignoramuses. In fact, ho put himself ‘‘on the spot” by ■ telling the world that, those learned I professors had actually been responsible. with himself for the numerousi deaths which had taken place. Old Klein got rid of him by giving him a position in which he had to (each students through demonstrations on dummies, not on living women. But. before he left, the Budapest Whippersnapper, as he had. come to be called, had. discovered another fad i about childbed fever—that. it camel not; only from the bodies of the dead, hilt, any purulent sickness of the liv-' lug. He knew then that, doctors must; chlorine wash between every casei handled. ! The month after Semmelweis left 29 women died of childbed fever in the hirst Division. Klein and the new , iH.sistant. Braun, both thought washing in chlorine water was silly. In his new job—an honorary posi- ? Lion in St. Rochus Hospital—Semmelweis found several cases dying. Their 8

doctor had worked on them with hands foul from septic opeations.

Semmelweis went to work. Discovering one source after another of blood-poisoning infection, he lost only eight mothers out of a thousand in the next six years. The Hungarian came to be loved by mothers and husbands and detested by the hospital staff. He was so idiotically clean. He nagged everybody, insisting that they disinfect not only themselves but their instruments, syringes and bandages.

Later he secured the position of professor in Budapest University. In the hospital appalling conditions of sanitation existed. But even there, by making an everlastng, persistent, confounded nuisance of himself, he kept death at bay. Being clean was his one simple trick. He had no money for research. He hadn’t an animal or a test tube. Microbes were less than a myth to him.

In 1856 he made his last discoveryin the University Hospital he had marvellous results with no women dying. Then suddenly deaths began again. The women were having babies on bed linen that had been infected by other dead patients. The hospital authorities were not being efficient, saving expenses by skimping the laundry bills. Semmelweis raised a violent protest, but nothing was done —until ho collected a bundle of the sheets, walked with them into the office of the highest official, and held them under his nose. The refined man shuddered, and the mothers stopped dying. ONLY TWO CONVERTS. Semmelweis had now been at work on his theory for 11 years., and in all that time he had made only two converts among all the professors of Europe. Mothers all ovei* the country were dying in thousands. Semmelweis had not, so far, published a word about his findings. He had “an inborn loathing for anything called writing,”

he said. At last he realised that he must do something to preach his gospel farther than he had done hitherto. He set to work, and, in 1861, his masterpiece, “The Aetiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.” was Hung at the appalled heads of the obsteri-

cians of Europe. These men were astounded into silence. Semmelweis took their silence for insult. He singled out certain professors for attack in open letters, even denouncing

,I some of them as murderers. ’ The doctors at last began to listen to him- But just at that time something began to happen to Semmelweis's brain. It began to let him down, and eventually he had to be locked up in an asylumOn April 17, 1865, he died. When he was admitted to the asylum he had a sore finger from a knife slip at a last operation he hau perf.rmcd in Budapest. The blood-poisoning death j he himself had discovered had got. him —mercifully. i Semmelweis was no martyr, how- | ever, in spite of what many of his biographers have said—that it was.the long neglect of his great, discovery and the sneers of his professional opponents that, drove him crazy. But { the report of the pathologists alter his autopsy showed chronic meningitits. | astrophied brain, degeneration in his , spinal cord. These things were not i the result of neglect or persecution. | Five days before Semmelweis died the famous Lister did his first anti-] septic operation. That, was 18 years„ after Semmelweis had proved' that death can creep in from without. r B' l \VO unequalled Paints Anvil Lustrous and Steelite. —Smith and Smith. Ltd.