As stunning as the results were, Semmelweis had no explanation that he could visualize. Was it blood? A fluid? A particle? Senior surgeons in Vienna didn’t believe in germ theory and had no interest in a junior assistant’s insistence that they wash their hands between the clinics. Semmelweis was harassed and ridiculed, passed over for a promotion, and eventually dismissed from the hospital. The idea that childbed fever was, in fact, a “doctor’s plague”—an iatrogenic, physician-induced disease—could hardly sit well with the professors of Vienna. He wrote increasingly frustrated and accusatory
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