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I’ve been looking into hospital hygiene for a freelance article I’m working on, and this article from the Times magazine had a doozy of a historical anecdote on the topic. After reading it, I felt the need to wash my hands a couple million times, OCD-style:
While it is now well established that germs cause illness, this wasn’t always known to be true. In 1847, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was working in a Viennese maternity hospital with two separate clinics. In one clinic, babies were delivered by physicians; in the other, by midwives. The mortality rate in the doctors’ clinic was nearly triple the rate in the midwives’ clinic. Why the huge discrepancy? The doctors, it turned out, often came to deliveries straight from the autopsy ward, promptly infecting mother and child with whatever germs their most recent cadaver happened to carry. Once Semmelweis had these doctors wash their hands with an antiseptic solution, the mortality rate plummeted.
The rest of the article has some equally gross modern-day stuff about how bacteria can thrive on just about any available surface. If you’ve ever skipped the sink after using a public restroom (we’re talking to you, Britney), please go read it right now.
Comments (6)
Comment
Not to mention how poor the hygiene in hospitals are as well. Not talking about during surgeries, but doctors oftenly put on gloves during exams only to touch contaminated areas possibly carrying contagions to you, or contaminate areas with your body fluids, which could’ve been avoided by simply changing gloves. So it’s not only about bad hygiene, but also about bad routines. Sure medical care has come far since the 19th century, but there’s still lots of basic things left to be desired.
…and then many want to do crackdowns on piercing studios for this same reason, Pfft! How about cleaning up your own backyard first?
posted by MrPumpernickel on 9-28-2006 at 12:05 pm
I was doing some research about the history of medicine and in the 1600s, when doctors were beginning to replace midwives at deliveries, people noticed that more women died when a doctor assisted with the delivery than a midwife. One theory is that doctors (who were all men) used various gadgets (early forcepts, for example) to assist with the birth. Since they didn’t know anything about sterilizing their instruments, they just wiped them off and put them back in the bag ready for the next birth. Midwives tended to use their hands or perhaps some string but that was burned after the birth. Midwives were often accused of being witches which helped the doctors corner the delivery market….which lowered the mother’s chances of survival.
posted by Worrals on 9-28-2006 at 1:56 pm
And there is my pet peeve:
Germs carried by Doctors wearing ties!
patients cough on them…and even though the doctor may have washed up they routinely touch their ties sending the germs back on their merry way!
posted by Lauren on 9-28-2006 at 3:04 pm
True, ties do tend to carry bacteria. In a recent study of doctors’ ties, they found them to be absolutely crawling with bugs. Of course this was a surrogate endpoint… but now I don’t wear a tie when seeing patients(I do wash my hand though).
posted by MDKY on 9-28-2006 at 10:23 pm
And don’t forget about the most common instrument used by providers that carry around potentially infectious organisms, the pen.
posted by Todd on 9-29-2006 at 12:07 am
On the Scottish island of St Kilda the infant mortality rate in the 19th century approached 50%, largely due to a disease called “eight days sickness”. The disease–neonatal tetanus due to infections of the umbilical cord stump–was later postulated to be due to midwives’ practice of cleaning the stump with oil made from seabirds (although later studies suggest that endemic tetanus spores in the soil are a more likely culprit). Eight-day sickness was completely wiped out when midwives were taught more modern wound-care techniques. Unfortunately, St Kilda itself was also completely wiped out in the early 20th century by declining birth rates and emigration and today it is one of Northern Europe’s most famous ghosts towns:
http://www.kilda.org.uk/
posted by doctor in training on 9-29-2006 at 10:16 am