Special Guest Blogger: Ignaz Semmelweis

Sometimes a little guy will wander onto History's highway and manage to do something that changes the world for the better, and in a huge way but not only not get recognised but die in a mental hospital for it but i'm not bitter. Okay a bit maybe.
I worked as a doctor and trainer at the Obstetrical Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital where we had two clinics, a training one and a second one run only by midwives with no actual doctors or students but the first one had such an awful rate of disease and mortality that pregnant women would beg to be admitted to the second one which had hardly any deaths.
My story starts when i was sat there one day and pondered why the women who came to our clinic not only gained a baby but a deadly disease so i began comparing the two and the only difference was the first clinic had students learning birthing, autopsying and everything in between and the second was run just by midwives and then after a colleague died after being poked by a scalpel and his autopsy discovered he had the same disease most of the women were dying from, the light-bulb flashed that the students were carrying particles on their hands and instruments from the autopsy room to the patients they examined in the first Clinic, contaminating the women with the disease from the autopsies.
I instructed the students to perform a simple hand washing task after handling dead guys and immediately got the death rate down to 1% and excited by my discovery, i wrote a book suggesting that doctors and students should wash their hands and instruments between the autopsy room and the birthing rooms and it would drastically reduce the contamination.
You would think that i would be chaired on shoulders around Vienna in triumph but what happened was monocles popped out all over Europe as the continents stuffiest old coots dropped their morning cognacs in unison and harrumphed in rage, as elegant ladies swooned in horror at the suggestion that doctors hands were dirty enough to kill people.
At this point i possibly could have accepted my request was too radical for a profession that decided blood letting was the sharp edge of medical technology and just quietly gone about my job but i took the other option of writing angry letters to all the prominent doctors who were rejected and ridiculing my discovery and calling them morons, ignoramuses and murderers which saw me dismissed from my job at the hospital.
Jobless and with the ridicule continuing, i began to drink heavily and sought out prostitutes and would rant about how only i knew the secret of how doctors were killing their patients which was so embarrassing for my family and the medical profession that they invited me to have a look at the new Viennese Insane asylum which proved to be a bad move on my part because when i got there they grabbed me, threw me into a straight jacket and tried to lock me in a cell.
A struggle ensued and i was beaten so badly by the guards that i died from my wounds two weeks later.  Years later Joseph Lister actually took my findings and confirmed them in his Germ Theory of Disease and the rest of the world came around to the concept of washing their hands to keep from getting sick and decided that i wasn't a nut after all and named me as a pioneer of antiseptic policy, named medical universities and put my face on stamps and even named a minor planet after me but too late ignoramuses, far too late.