Ignaz Motherfucking Semmelweis
Guys. GUYS. Get ready to have your face blasted off by badassery, because we’re about to talk about another holy shit human from history: Ignaz Semmelweis.
This distinguished-ass gentleman right here.
In 1846, he was working as chief resident of obstetrics, or for you unaware fuckers, helping people burst out of other people, at the maternity ward of the Vienna Hospital. Here’s the deal: people used to kill babies a lot more back then, specifically if they were born out of wedlock or if there was no way to pay for them. Dead babies are generally considered pretty fucking terrible, so some governments in Europe set up maternity clinics that offered benefits and care for both the kid and the mother. This also allowed doctors and midwives to hone their baby-catching chops…which yeah, reasonably seems pretty problematic, you know, using poor women as guinea pigs, but you just fucking wait.
In Semmelweis’ hospital, there were two maternity clinics. The First Clinic, affectionately known as the “Let’s Be Real, You’re Probably Fucked” clinic, had a death rate that was over twice as high as the Second Clinic. The deaths in the You’re Fucked clinic were due to a higher rate of puerperal fever (otherwise known as “childbed fever” or “holy fuck, giving birth in this century is terrifying fever”), an infection of lady parts post-childbirth that can lead to sepsis and death. The fact that the First Clinic was a feverish death trap became known outside the hospital, and women would actually straight up give birth in the street rather than go there. The place was so bad that squatting over a filthy fucking curb and shitting a kid out there looked pretty good, all things considered.
Semmelweis obviously noticed that one of his clinics kept fucking killing people, and, because he was a badass, this really bothered him. He obsessively and meticulously searched for the reason people kept getting sick in Clinic Kill. If both of the clinics operated with the same practices, why was one a murder festival? He eliminated cause after cause like a goddamned sleuth, but kept coming up empty. The only possible difference was that one clinic was staffed with medical students and the other was staffed with midwives, but what could that possibly mean? Hold your goddamned horses, fuckers, and put a pin in that, because something’s about to happen that’s gunna switch on a lightbulb over S-dog’s head.
In 1847, after a year of watching his patients fucking bite it, Semmelweis watched as a good friend accidentally pricked himself with a scalpel during an autopsy, and then quickly died. Semmelweis performed his autopsy (because you’ve gotta be a bro), and found that his body looked an awful lot like the bodies that were coming out of Clinic Are You Fucking Kidding Me With This en masse. In fact, it appeared that they had all died of a very similar thing. And then it hit him: OH! IT’S THE CORPSE JUICE. THE CORPSE JUICE ON THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE OPERATING IN CLINIC AVOIDABLE-ASS DEATH.
Oh, did I not mention? The medical students who staffed the First Clinic had a regular habit of shoving their fists into corpses right before they shoved them into ladies, often, and I shit you not with this, going back and forth from corpse to vagina like the world’s most medically irresponsible relay race. Autopsies were part of their training, and they figured, hey, let’s be efficient with this shit, right? Now spread your legs and let me get Carl’s dead-ass fluids all up inside you.
Germ theory hadn’t been invented yet, so pathology was basically fucking unicorns and guesses, but Semmelweis connected the BIG ASS FUCKING DOTS that maybe the horrible, fetid-smelling corpse juice had some not-so-great shit in it and shouldn’t be going near live bodies. It was LITERALLY HITTING EVERYONE IN THE FACE with it’s horrible stench and Semmelweis had the wherewithal to be like, oh hey maybe your hands shouldn’t smell like that when you’re delivering babies, just a thought. So he instituted hand washing with chlorinated lime between corpse time and baby time.
Pictured: Semmelweis getting people to wash their dirty corpse-groping paws.
Guys. GUYS. Guess what fucking happened. Mortality dropped 90% in the First Clinic. 90. Motherfucking. Percent. That’s a fuckton less dead women right there. So now everybody accepts that Semmelweis was on to something fucking brilliant and lifesaving and hand washing becomes the fixture of medicine that it is today, right?
NOPE. WRONG, MOTHERFUCKERS.
The prevailing idea of the day was that, despite the disease having a single motherfucking name, every person suffering from puerperal fever had a unique cause for their symptoms, often stemming from an “imbalance” of the fucking imaginary “four humours”, which, fucking surprise surprise, was treated by cutting fucking holes in the sick person and bleeding them out, or “purging the bowels” (aka forcing them to shit and vom themselves to death). And again, totally shocking, these “imbalances” were often blamed on moral or temperamental flaws in the lady fucking writhing in agony in front of them. Because fuck you, women, that’s why. Surely if God didn’t want you to suffer, you’d be just fine right now. Better work on that, bitch.
Another idea Semmelweis’ “just wash your goddamned hands, Jesus fucking Christ” initiative challenged was the concept of how disease spreads. If it wasn’t just because she was a harletous impudent woman, the patient’s upset humors were thought to be caused by the spread of “bad air”, referred to as “miasmas”, or, more cuntily, “unfavorable atmospheric-cosmic-terrestrial influences.” The idea that the corpse-stanked hands of doctors might be possibly spreading disease was just too fucking much for these assholes.
But here’s the kicker. Many doctors took offense, motherfucking shitty ass prideful offense, and thought that Semmelweis was casting shade on their cleanliness. His suggestion that they wash the fucking DEAD, ROTTING HUMAN FLUID off their stupid idiot hands was an affront to their honor.
So, instead of considering the actual fact of way less dead ladies, the medical community let “NEW THINGS SCARE ME” and “I AM A VERY CLEAN MAN YES I AM” overwhelm the dialogue, and Semmelweis was largely ignored. More than that, he was aggressively shot down. Many in the Vienna medical community did everything they could to discredit Semmelweis’ idea as nonscientific (because he couldn’t quite explain WHY, on a molecular level, not slathering vaginas with corpse bits was bad). In 1849, when his term at the maternity clinic was set to end, his supervisor replaced him with a different doctor who would be totes cool towing the “corpses and vaginas: BFFs for life” party line. Fine. But Semmelweis wasn’t about to back down, and resolved to take his take my totally fucking reasonable ideas elsewhere. He went to the Viennese authorities and basically begged them to make him a docent, which was essentially a medical professor. They denied him (possibly because all the rest of the medical authority in Vienna were all “nah, that guy’s bad news, he insults the dainty immaculacy of my gentleman hands, now pass me that amputated arm so I can use it to yank this baby out”), but eventually, after more than a year of petitioning by the increasingly pissed off Semmelweis, they told him he could have a post. Except instead of a regular post, he wouldn’t have access to actual humans, and could only teach students using leather mannequins. BECAUSE THE GUY WITHOUT THE CORPSE JUICE ON HIS HANDS IS THE DANGEROUS ONE, RIGHT?
Semmelweis was officially done with Vienna’s shit. This was one last slap to the face, and he was like, “peace, you corpse-juice-covered bitches”, and moved to Budapest…
…where he continued to face some obstinate-ass bullshit for speaking some actual, verified-by-less-dead-ladies, common ass sense. Upon arrival, he took a position at Szent Rokus Hospital, where puerperal fever was off the motherfucking charts. On his first day, he was presented with one recently dead person and five other very fucking soon to be dead people among his patients. At which point he rolled up his tired-ass sleeves, cracked his knuckles, and was like “Okay, let’s wash some fucking hands, son.” The hospital, presumably desperate for less people to die all over it, went along with his crazy anti-corpse/lady-mingling stance, and motherfuckers started washing their hands between life cycle events. And wow, fucking shocker, PEOPLE STOPPED GETTING SICK. Over the course of Semmelweis’ five years at the hospital, only eight people died. EIGHT. That’s like, a motherfucking miracle in mid-19th century terms.
But in Budapest, the doctors weren’t having it. Whether it was because of institutional stubbornness, or pride, or fear of change, or just straight up love of fucking up medically, Semmelweis’ ideas kept getting talked shit about and generally not implemented. That’s right, despite the fact that Semmelweis had basically eradicated the disease that was raging through hospitals and killing people, these motherfuckers STILL wouldn’t follow his lead by washing their goddamned hands. He eventually became professor of obstetrics at the University of Pest (despite the opposition of his colleagues), and, during his tenure, surprise motherfucking surprise, puerperal fever magically stopped happening there, too. But despite this ridiculous train of proof that followed him wherever he went like some sort of anti-dead-lady breadcrumb trail, medical authorities weren’t on board, and women were dying all over their clinics while they used their nasty ass corpsey hands to cut their veins open…for health.
Still, in the face of all this, Semmelweis wasn’t giving up. It would have been much easier professionally to just sit back and go with the corpse-vag flow, but he was a fucking badass, and he knew what he was saying was as important as it was true. He published two books explaining the theory of “WASH YOUR IDIOT HANDS BEFORE YOU PUT THEM INSIDE PEOPLE”, and he was generally mocked and derided all over Europe (with the exception of England, where doctors tended to accept his idea, but only if they imagined that they’d had it first, because Imperialism is one hell of a drug). Doctors actively published works refuting his claim and generally mocking him like the all around dicks they were, and, more shittily, refusing to implement hand washing. In a really fucking horrific turn of events, the First Clinic in Vienna where Semmelweis figured all this shit out was returned to it’s former status as Clinic Shit Out of Luck If You’re Not Trying to Die by Semmelweis’ replacement, who wrote in a fucking textbook that things like “mistakes in diet”, “emotional traumata”, “chilling”, and just plain conception and pregnancy themselves were more likely to cause puerperal fever than a healthy dose of dead dude in a lady’s twat.
Semmelweis, thoroughly done with everybody’s shit.
Now, I’ll say right now, Semmelweis wasn’t the most diplomatic dude. He wasn’t about to stand for the backward bullshit he was seeing around him, and said so. He railed against people ignoring obvious results and letting their patients die, and sure, also about being mistreated by the medical community on a personal level. It’s been said that maybe, if he’d managed to be more accommodating or a better communicator, he might have been able to have more influence, but I’m gunna call bullshit on that in a general way. These fuckers were obviously held up in a structure of stubborn ass power, and they weren’t going to give up on their determination to ignore common sense just because someone asked a little more nicely. And holy shit, can you blame this motherfucker for being angry? That shit is INFURIATING, even now, to your humble writer addressing you from a, very thankfully, less corpse-hand-in-my-vag-happy era of time.
So Semmelweis gets progressively more fed up, and progressively angrier. He gets depressed under the weight of the medical authority’s bullshit, and starts experiencing nervous breaks…and who fucking wouldn’t? If you had an inconceivably easy way for people to prevent shit tons of death and people were ignoring it and MOCKING YOU FOR IT, you’d start to feel crazy, too. He became obsessed with his mistreatment by the medical community and with how fucking stupid they were for not listening to him, and wrote a series of increasingly ranty, furious open letters to the shit-eating top obstetricians of Europe. He called them idiots and murderers, because they were being idiots and murderers, presumably eliciting scandalized gasps from the people who couldn’t be bothered to malign their honor by washing their fucking mitts to save lives. Eventually, Semmelweis became totally consumed with childbed fever, and any time anyone tried to talk to him, he’d veer the conversation toward it. He also started drinking a shit ton, which amped the WHY WON’T THESE FUCKERS JUST WASH THEIR FUCKING HANDS rants up to fucking 11. Dude was not fun at parties. Imagine your bitter ass drunk uncle at Christmas, and magnify that by the power of actually justified indignation. Yeah. People have speculated about what caused Semmelweis’ mental state and behavior, with guesses ranging from dementia to advanced syphilis, but I think it’s pretty fucking safe to say that he was just so entirely over presenting a clear and obvious truth to people and having them ignore him.
Eventually, in 1865, he was committed to a mental institution (which, if you know anything about mental institutions at that time, is VERY FUCKING BAD NEWS). It was done super shittily, too: a friend told him he was taking him on a professional visit to the hospital, and when he got there he was fucking jumped with a straightjacket, beat into unconsciousness, and thrown in a dark cell. He died two weeks later, either from internal injuries from the initial beating, or from some of the fucking medieval bullshit that passed for “treatment” back then. That’s what you get for trying to save lives with obvious ass hygiene.
Here’s the thing about holy shit humans, dear reader. They’re just that: human. Semmelweis had a truth, had a fucking simple ass thing that doctors could do to prevent the agonizing and totally unnecessary deaths of their patients, and he endured years of watching that truth go unheeded. And though he felt the weight of that experience, he never fucking let it stop him from telling that truth, and calling out the stubborn shitheads who were refusing to acknowledge it at the cost of their patients’ lives. And because of that, and because of the motherfucking horrible world that he lived in, Semmelweis died alone, likely in pain, on the floor of a mental institution, while doctors all over Europe continued plunging their dead-dude-drenched hands into their patients’ business.
Here’s another thing about holy shit humans: they might not live to see vindication or to see the effects of what made them so badass, but we are, so let’s fucking tell it. Though very few of those medical fuckers came to his funeral and refused to acknowledge his life or his work, and though the idiot they had replace him at the Pest University maternity clinic immediately drove the death rate right back to where it had been pre-Semmelweis, certain non-hand-washing douchebags would soon find themselves on the wrong-ass side of history. Around 20 years later, Louis Pasteur broke the fucking door down with his germ theory of disease, at which point Semmelweis theory was given the scientific backing it needed (as if LESS DEAD HUMANS wasn’t reason enough to at least fucking try washing your hands every once in a fucking while). These days, when he’s brought up (which is pretty rare, in general), it’s as an example of the value of empiricism—aka, noticing what you’re fucking looking at and making motherfucking cause and effect conclusions about it. But I think what makes him truly badass is his refusal to capitulate, to bend and live comfortably within the status quo when he knew the status quo was wrong as hell. Because when you see something as true as “don’t put your fucking corpse juice hands into ladies, it kills them”, you fucking fight for it, even if the powers that be are sticking to their idiot guns.
Holy shit, Ignaz. Holy shit.
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