A hospital in Vienna noted that many of their female patients were dying of “childbed fever” after they had given birth in the hospital. The rates of this fever were much higher in the hospital than they were for women who had given birth at a different clinic. In fact, 10% of the women at the hospital contracted fever compared to 4% at the clinic. Ignatz Semmelweis was a doctor at the clinic and he felt that the fever was being transmitted on the hands of doctors when they went from the morgue to examine women. He asked the doctors to wash their hands and the number of cases of “childbed fever” were reduced. He also noted that a doctor contracted the same fever after he cut himself with a scalpel that had been used on an autopsy.
Semmelweis concluded that the fever was caused by some element that could be transferred from person to person.