Childbed fever
This is the current revision of Childbed fever as edited by Amorrow (talk | contribs) at 01:12, January 21, 2021. This URL is a permanent link to this version of this page.
Childbed fever accounted for half of all maternal deaths associated with childbirth in the 1800s, but no one knew the cause or how to prevent it. Ignaz Semmelweiss, a medical student in Vienna, tried making doctors wash their hands before encountering the mother, significantly cutting the death rate. In America, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes had a similar idea. But it was not until Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease that the idea of handwashing to save a patient's life became popular among phyisicans.