Who Discovered That Handwashing Saves Lives?

The simple act of hand hygiene once sounded ridiculous to the medical world.

In the 1840s, inside the crowded halls of Vienna General Hospital, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something deeply disturbing.

Women giving birth in the doctors’ ward were dying at terrifying rates from childbed fever — far more often than women delivered by midwives. It was not a small difference. It was a deadly one. The mortality…