Observation goes a long way

Many scientific discoveries were a result of  observations and subsequent investigations. Everyone has heard the famous discovery of the antibiotic penicillin which was an 'accident' in the lab; because of the keen observations of the scientists involved, today it is being used as a valuable medicine.

I came across this wonderful incident where childbed fever was managed well because of a brilliant observation made by one physician.

Childbed fever also known as Puerperal fever was a disease which caused many deaths of mothers soon after labour . In 1847, a physician Ignaz Semmelweis was so disturbed by the deaths of these mothers and decided to investigate. In the obstetrics ward of the Viennese hospital where he worked, he noticed a strange pattern. Women in labour were admitted to two clinics in that hospital and most deaths occurred in the first clinic. The two clinics seemed identical , the difference was in the staffing. Medical students worked in the first and midwives worked in the second. Semmelweis did further investigations and found that medical students spent their mornings in the morgue learning about anatomy, and goes to the first clinic. Semmelweis concluded that they must be carrying something 'deadly' with them and ordered the medical students to wash their hands with chlorine solution before entering the clinic. Eventhough Semmelweis was criticized by the medical community saying 'doctor's job is a gentlemen's job and cleaning is not necessary' , after medical students started practicing washing hands, the death rate reduced to very low numbers.

The reason Semmelweis chose chlorine was because it removed the characteristic  odur of  the morgue. We now know today that chlorine also killed the deadly streptococcal bacteria which caused the disease. Semmelweise was ridiculed by the medical community and died of a streptococcal infection in 1865, three decades later Pasture and Koch provided scientific explanations for Semmelweise's findings.

Ignaz Semmelweise never received the proper recognition, but his observation lead to proper management of childbed fever and introduced the practice of maintaining sterile conditions in medicine.

 

references: 

The Attempt to Understand Puerperal Fever in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Influence of Inflammation Theory.Med Hist. 2005 January 1; 49(1): 1–28.