Medical breakthroughs
that were initially ridiculed or rejected

Although medical science most often advances incrementally on the basis of an ever-accumulating body of evidence, occasionally leaps forward are made. Quite often these leaps fly in the face of conventional wisdom, and are ridiculed or rejected by the medical establishment.

Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician working in a maternity ward in Vienna in the mid-19th century. He came to the conclusion that puerperal fever was contagious by observing that students and physicians were performing autopsies and then attending new mothers, many of whom would soon become ill and die.

He then advocated that doctors in obstetric clinics disinfect their hands following autopsies. The result: at the clinic in which his hand-washing policy was implemented, the puerperal fever mortality rates dropped from 18.3% to less than 2% in fewer than 6 months.

Despite Semmelweis’s demonstration of the value of antiseptic techniques, by and large his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Because of this, he began publishing a series of vitriolic “open letters” against his critics. Isolated and unpredictable, Semmelweis was admitted against his will to an insane asylum, where he died after two weeks.

Gabriel Miller. Internet: <www.medscape.com> (adapted).