Semmelweis, Ignaz Philipp, << ZEHM uhl `vys,` IHG nahts FEE lihp >> (1818-1865), was a Hungarian doctor who first used antiseptic methods systematically in childbirth. In a clinic at the Vienna General Hospital in Vienna, Austria, he discovered that puerperal fever, which then killed about 13 percent of all mothers and newborns, was contagious, and that doctors were spreading the disease by not cleaning their hands after performing autopsies. He was ridiculed for this idea. But he maintained his stand, and in 1861 published his classic work on The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbirth Fever. Opponents of his ideas attacked him fiercely, and this battle eventually brought on a mental illness. The year of Semmelweis’s death, the British surgeon Joseph Lister performed his first antiseptic operation, and soon afterward it was recognized that Semmelweis had been right. Semmelweis was born on July 1, 1818, in Buda (now part of Budapest). He died on Aug. 13, 1865.
