What happened at Vienna's Allgemeines Krankenhaus after Semmelweis's contract as Assistant in the First Maternity Division was terminated?

Abstract

Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis is famous for dramatically reducing puerperal mortality while he was an Assistant in Vienna's largest hospital, the Allgemeines Krankenhaus; he did this, mainly, by requiring medical personnel to disinfect their hands by washing in a chlorine solution. But Semmelweis was soon removed from his post as assistant. The conventional view, which is suggested by Semmelweis's own account, is that his contemporaries were skeptical of his results, that he was marginalized and that once he was no longer directly responsible for caring for maternity patients, puerperal mortality returned to its former high levels. In fact, the situation appears to have been quite different. In this paper, we calculate and discuss the number of deaths at the Allgemeines maternity clinic after Semmelweis was removed from his position. As we will see, his successors maintained a relatively low mortality rate roughly consistent with the rate Semmelweis himself achieved. This suggests that the chlorine washings were probably still used conscientiously after he left and that the opposition he encountered had other sources than doubts about the effectiveness of the chlorine washings.