Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, The Prophet of Bacteriology

Abstract

Although by 1931 I. Ph. Semmelweis' achievements and the tragedy of his life had been given their due place in the history of mankind, Alexander Fränkel, formerly Theodor Billroth's assistant and later his biographer, critically stated that the discoverer of the causes of puerperal fever should have defended his discovery with facts rather than with fanaticism. It was only a few years after Semmelweis' death, for instance, that Billroth made laborious experiments. Billroth's work on Coccobacteria had important implications and even influenced Robert Koch, although his hypotheses did not really predict the pathogenic and specific nature of microbes. In 1847 Semmelweis postulated his theory; ie, that the pathological-anatomical changes which he observed in the bodies of the women who died in childbed, in their newborn infants, and in the autopsy findings on his friend Jakob Kolletschka were an entity, morphologically and clinically. He summed them up under the concept of pyemia. Even though Semmelweis was continually abhorred by the evident statistics and would have been able to prove his discovery through animal experiments, he primarily took to the pen to defend his opinion vehemently. Only the clinical facts proved him right during his lifetime; the triumph of bacteriology which began after his death made him not only the “savior of mothers” but also a genial ancestor of bacteriology.

On the Usefulness of “Value” in the Definition of Creativity

“…A similar process of initial rejection followed by slow long-term acceptance was seen in the history of the idea that the main cause of stomach ulcers was the bacterium H-pylori (Thagard, 1999). An even longer-term process took place in the medical community's acceptance of Semmelweis's idea that childbed fever in maternal hospitals was spread through cadaver-to-patient contact, bought about by physicians who did not wash their hands when going from performing postmortem examinations to delivering babies (Nuland, 2004;Wyklicky & Skopec, 1983). The opposite process-a valued set of ideas becoming rejected, i.e., going from creative to noncreativeoccurred when the phlogiston theory of combustion was replaced by Lavoisier's theory of oxidation based on oxygen (Morris, 1972).…”

Health Care Personnel’s Attitude toward Hand Hygiene in Regard to the Prevention of Health-Care Associated Infections: A Cross Sectional Study at the University Hospital Pristine

“…Hospital-acquired infections are called also Nosocomial Infections. In 1843 a Hungarian obstetric established foundations of the discipline of infection control and hospital epidemiology by recommending hand washing method by chlorinated water in order to prevent and reduce incidence of puerperal fevers [7]. While, in 1867 Joseph Lister, by conducting a study on the role of bacteria in infectious of surgical wounds and use of antiseptic sprays in the surgery theatres, established principles of sepsis and antisepsis [8].…”

A Discussion of the Role of Complex Evolved Systems in the Development of Invasive Cardiovascular Interventions as Illustrated by the Blalock- Taussig Shunt and Intra-Arterial Stents

“…Hofstadter stated in 1951: "Prediction and explanation are the two main functions of scientific knowledge" [71]. Salmon echoed this in 1978: "Science, the majority of philosophy of science texts say, has at least two principal aims-prediction (construed broadly enough to include inference from the observed to the unobserved, regardless of temporal relations) and explanation" [72]. While the preceding may seem self-evident to anyone educated in science, the term predict can be used in two ways in science.…”