Ignaz Semmelweis

Hello, my name is Ignaz Semmelweis. I was born a long time ago, on July 1st, 1818, in a city that is now called Budapest in the country of Hungary. Even when I was just a boy, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to become a doctor. My biggest wish was to help people who were sick feel better. I studied hard so that one day I could work in a hospital and take care of others. Helping people was the most important thing to me.

When I finally became a doctor, I went to work at a big hospital in a city called Vienna, Austria, in the year 1846. I worked in a special part of the hospital where new mothers stayed with their newborn babies. But I quickly noticed a very sad and puzzling problem. In the part of the hospital where doctors like me worked, many mothers became sick with a dangerous illness called 'childbed fever' right after their babies were born. But in another part of the hospital, where women called midwives helped deliver babies, the mothers were staying healthy and strong. It made me feel very determined. 'Why is this happening?' I would ask myself over and over. I promised myself I would solve this mystery.

To solve the puzzle, I decided to watch everything very, very carefully. I watched the doctors and I watched the midwives. Soon, I noticed a big difference. The doctors in the first clinic would often go from working with people who were already very sick directly to helping the new mothers. I saw that they didn't wash their hands in between these two jobs. That's when I had a big idea. What if there were tiny, invisible things on the doctors' hands? And what if those particles were traveling from the sick people and making the healthy mothers ill? In those days, people did not know about germs, so this was a very new and strange idea. It was like an invisible enemy that no one could see.

In the year 1847, I decided to test my idea. I asked all of the doctors and medical students in my clinic to do one simple thing before they helped any of the new mothers. They had to wash their hands in a special cleaning liquid made with chlorine. I watched and waited to see what would happen. And you know what? It worked. It really worked. All of a sudden, almost none of the mothers got sick with childbed fever anymore. I felt so happy because my idea was saving lives. But it was also very frustrating. Many of the other doctors did not believe me. They said my idea was silly because they could not see the invisible 'germs' with their own eyes. They did not want to change their ways, and it was very hard to convince them.

I spent the rest of my life trying to tell other doctors and hospitals how important it was to have clean hands to keep patients safe. I lived to be 47 years old. For a long time, many people didn't listen, but a good idea can't be forgotten forever. Years after I was gone, other scientists proved that germs were real. Today, everyone knows to wash their hands to stop sickness from spreading. I am remembered as the 'savior of mothers' for figuring out this simple but powerful way to save lives.