Unifying Business, Data, and Code

Preface

In the 1840s, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis encountered a perplexing challenge while working in the maternity clinic at the General Hospital in Vienna. A significant number of women were succumbing to a mysterious ailment known as “childbed fever,” which plagued many European hospitals.

Semmelweis made a striking observation: the maternity ward overseen by male doctors had a significantly higher mortality rate than the one managed by midwives. Furthermore, he noticed that doctors often proceeded directly from performing autopsies to examining expectant mothers.

After a colleague pricked his own finger while doing an autopsy, resulting in the colleague falling ill and eventually dying, Semmelweis had a revelatory moment: perhaps what killed his colleague might be also killing the women in childbirth.

Semmelweis theorized that contaminants from the cadavers that doctors were operating on and using to teach medical students might be transferring to the women, leading to the fever. To test this hypothesis, he implemented a policy in 1847 that required doctors to wash their hands with a chlorine solution to eliminate what he called “cadaverous particles,” before examining pregnant women.

Following the implementation of this handwashing policy, the maternal mortality rate in the doctors’ ward plummeted from 18% to a mere 2%. However, Semmelweis’s ideas were met with skepticism from the medical community because they challenged the scientific beliefs at the time, ...