Ignaz Semmelweis
Hungarian physician, early pioneer of antiseptic procedures (1818–1865)
- Fame61.2
- Momentum0.0
- Doctors rank#37
Source-basedFalling
- Fame61.2
- Momentum0.0
- Doctors rank#37
- Wikipedia59.9K
Lived 1818–1865, aged 47
DoctorsDoctor
Summary
Updated 2026-06-21
He proved that doctors washing their hands could cut maternal death rates from 18% to under 2%, and the medical establishment mocked him for it. Semmelweis died in an asylum at 47, beaten by guards, decades before germ theory made his work common sense.
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Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician of German descent working at Vienna General Hospital when he noticed that doctors' wards had three times the childbed fever mortality of midwives' wards. In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions — maternal mortality plummeted from 18% to less than 2%. He published his findings in 1861, but the medical community rejected them outright; he could offer no theoretical explanation for why disinfection worked, and some doctors took offense at the implication they were unclean. By 1865, increasingly outspoken and seemingly unraveling…
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Falling61.2
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
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Historical26.2
Now attention10.7
Source confidence60.0
Completeness60.0
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- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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