Ignaz Semmelweis

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, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. He was beaten by guards and died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand, possibly caused by the beating. Only after Louis Pasteur confirmed germ theory and Joseph Lister adopted hygienic methods did the world recognize what Semmelweis had seen.