The doctor who cut death rates by making colleagues wash their hands

At Vienna General Hospital in 1847, women giving birth on the doctors' ward died of childbed fever at roughly four times the rate of those on the midwives' ward. Ignaz Semmelweis noticed doctors arrived straight from autopsies, and had them wash hands in chlorinated lime first — mortality fell from over 18% to under 2% within months. His colleagues, insulted by the implication, largely ignored him; he died before germ theory vindicated his discovery.

— Sherwin B. Nuland, The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis — 2003
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