Life / Medicine

Hygiene and antisepsis

Washing hands and cleaning wounds and instruments cut deadly hospital infections dramatically.

Ignaz Semmelweis showed in Vienna in 1847 that disinfecting hands sharply cut deaths from childbed fever, but doctors rejected him. Joseph Lister, inspired by Pasteur, used carbolic acid on wounds and instruments from 1867 and reduced deaths after operations. Together with anesthesia it made surgery survivable and later enabled heart surgery and transplants.