Which Hungarian physician advocated for hand washing to prevent childbed fever?

The Hungarian physician who advocated hand washing to prevent childbed fever was Ignaz Semmelweis. Working at Vienna General Hospital in 1847, he required doctors and medical students to wash their hands with chlorinated lime before examining maternity patients.

Semmelweis noticed that the hospital’s physician-staffed clinic had a much higher maternal death rate than the midwives’ clinic. He connected the difference to doctors and students moving from autopsies to deliveries, carrying what he called “cadaverous particles” on their hands. This was before germ theory had gained broad acceptance.

The intervention produced a dramatic result: mortality in the affected clinic fell from about 18% to below 2%. Semmelweis’s evidence was strong, but many contemporaries rejected or ridiculed his explanation because he could not yet identify microbes as the cause. Later work by Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister helped establish the scientific framework that vindicated his practical insight.