“Let me illustrate what I mean,” Theo continued. “Have either of you heard of Ignaz Semmelweis?”
“I haven’t,” Ana replied. Tom shook his head and leaned back in his chair.
“Semmelweis was an obstetrician and researcher at the Vienna General Hospital during the mid-1800s. The mortality rate was horrendous in the section of the maternity ward where he worked: one out of every ten women there died during childbirth. Their deaths haunted Semmelweis.
“The collection of symptoms associated with these cases was called childbed fever. It was a horrible, painful disease, and over half of the women who contracted it died in a matter of days. Can you imagine how frightening it would be to have your baby there?”
“I would’ve stayed home,” Ana said.
“You wouldn’t have been alone. In fact, this hospital had such a terrifying reputation that some women gave birth on the street and then went to the hospital.
“At the time, conventional medical science called for separate treatment for each symptom. Inflammation was thought to indicate excess blood, so they bled the patient or applied leeches. Fever was treated the same way. Respiratory problems suggested bad air, so they improved ventilation. They tried all of this to treat childbed fever, but nothing worked. The women kept dying.
“The terrible risk wasn’t a secret. Patients openly begged to be moved to a different part of the maternity ward. The other section had a mortality rate of one in fifty—still awful by today’s standards, but far better than Semmelweis’s area.
“Semmelweis couldn’t understand the discrepancy between the two sections of the maternity ward, and he became obsessed with the problem. The only obvious difference between the sections was that doctors worked in one, while patients in the other were attended by midwives. That seemed inconsequential, so Semmelweis tried to eliminate the other differences between the maternity sections.
“He standardized birthing positions, ventilation, and diets. He inspected how laundry was done. He looked at every possibility he could think of, but he found no answer. Nothing he tried made any measurable difference in the mortality rate.
“Then he visited another hospital for four months. And when he came back, he noticed that the mortality rate had improved significantly in his section of the maternity ward while he was away. It was the first real clue he had seen, and he was determined to follow it.
“But it wasn’t until one of his fellow researchers developed all the same symptoms of childbed fever and died from a scalpel scratch that Semmelweis started thinking about the research done by the doctors on cadavers.”
“Cadavers?” Tom asked.
“Yes. Vienna General was a teaching and research hospital. Many of the doctors split their time between treating patients and examining human remains.”
“Oh no,” Ana groaned.
“People didn’t understand germs in those days. Doctors mostly reacted to the symptoms of their patients without fully understanding their cause. But when Semmelweis compared his own routine to that of the doctor who had been his replacement, the only difference he saw was the amount of time performing cadaver research. It was the same difference he had failed to notice between the doctor and midwife sections of the ward; midwives didn’t work on cadavers, but doctors did.
“Semmelweis concluded that healthy patients were being infected with childbed fever by cadaver ‘particles’ on the hands of the physicians themselves. He immediately required hospital staff to thoroughly wash their hands in a chlorine solution before examining any patient. Almost immediately, the death rate plummeted to one in one hundred.”
“So the doctors were the carriers,” Tom said.
“They were,” Theo answered. “What a crucial and painful discovery. Semmelweis wrote this: ‘Only God knows the number of patients who went prematurely to their graves because of me.’
“Imagine the weight of that knowledge,” Theo continued. “The physicians were doing the best they knew, but they were carrying a disease they didn’t understand. All of those agonizing deaths, all of the bereaved families, all of the debilitating and horrific symptoms of childbed fever could have been prevented if the doctors had washed their hands.”
Ana closed her eyes. Tom was shaking his head.
“But of the many tragedies within this story,” Theo continued, “the most shocking may be this: the medical establishment at large refused to acknowledge Semmelweis’s findings or adopt his recommendations.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ana said.
Theo shrugged.
“What were they thinking? Tom exclaimed. “How could they possibly let more of those people die?”
Theo raised his glasses. “Rather than accept a painful truth that would save lives, they clung to a falsehood that kept them blameless.”
Tom rubbed his forehead.
“A doctor is meant to heal,” Theo said. “That’s part of what makes the Semmelweis story so heartbreaking. The very people who had studied and sacrificed and worked to care for others were the ones spreading disease.”
“That’s awful,” Ana whispered.
“It is,” Theo agreed. “And this story is a stark warning. If we don’t see clearly, we may harm the very people we intend to help. That holds true well beyond medicine. It applies to all human interaction. And, most importantly,” Theo said, sitting down and looking from Ana to Tom, “it applies to the way you are leading.”