Ignaz Semmelweis and the Fools’ Tower

Before the germ theory of medicine, there was a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, who practiced medicine at the Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s.

Semmelweis noticed, after an anatomy professor who was dissecting a cadaver for his students and cut himself with the scalpel, resulting in a severe infection (sepsis) which eventually claimed his life, that many doctors who practiced surgery on cadavers, were going afterwards to treat women in the hospital’s maternity ward.

After researching and comparing the death rate of women from child bed fever in the maternity ward with the death rate of women who were having their babies at home, he discovered that women giving birth in the hospital were dying at a much higher rate than those delivering at home. Guessing that there must have been some invisible infectious agent, he recommended that doctors wash their hands in chloride of lime. Following this advice and practice, the death rate of women giving birth in the hospital maternity ward went down to almost zero.

Semmelweis did an actual study and published it, but it was not well received at all. Instead of praising him, the international medical community at the time considered him a lunatic, denounced him as deranged, and decided to silence him.

European academia convinced a court in Vienna to declare him mentally insane when he did not stop teaching his medical students to wash their hands in chlorinated lime.

Semmelweis was shocked that eminent doctors, who knew he was right, would rather condemn women to death rather than admit that they were wrong. 

These eminent doctors, with the help of the Vienna court, condemned him to a mental asylum in Vienna, the Narrenturm (Fools tower), where he died years later. In a strange turn of events, a guard at the insane asylum struck him with an object, not sure if it was sharp or blunt, he got an infection and it resulted in his death.

Interestingly, Narrenturm still exists today. It is the oldest building in continental Europe for psychiatric patients. Built in 1784, it is located near the site of the old Vienna General Hospital. The circular building is now the location of the Federal Pathologic-Anatomical Museum of Vienna.

Millions of people since then have been saved because of Dr. Semmelweis’ discovery, a doctor who was humiliated and punished by his colleagues at European universities because he was right and they were wrong; they wanted to save their academic reputation and earnings. They did not care that they destroyed his career and his life. Even his wife left him.

He was eventually vindicated thirty years later with the advent of Robert Koch’s discovery of the TB bacillus, anthrax, and cholera, specific bacteria at the root of those infectious diseases.

Silencing Semmelweis was a sad chapter in the history of medicine, not unlike what happened to some doctors in the U.S. who refused to subject their patients to Covid-19 vaccines and instead treated them with drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin when they came down with Covid-19. The cure rate for such patients was astonishing, yet the medical profession and the press were laughing at them that they were using “horse paste” to treat the sick. These doctors were vilified, shamed, marginalized, turned into pariahs, their licenses were suspended, lost their hospital privileges, jobs, and professorships for which they had worked hard to achieve.