The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

what was the association between putrefaction caused by microbial cells and human disease? The first hint of a potential link came from a Hungarian obstetrician, Ignaz Semmelweis, who worked as an assistant in a Viennese maternity hospital in the late 1840s. The clinic was divided into two wards: the first clinic and the second clinic. Childbirth, in the nineteenth century, was almost as much life threatening as it was life giving. Infections—puerperal fever, or, more colloquially, “childbed fever”—caused postpartum death rates that ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent for mothers. Semmelweis noted a peculiar pattern: compared with the second clinic, the first clinic had a significantly higher rate of maternal mortality from childbed fever. News of this discrepancy, spread via gossip and rumor throughout Vienna, was an open secret. Pregnant women would beg, cajole, or manipulate their way to be admitted to the second clinic. Some women, wisely, even opted for so-called street births—outside the clinics—reasoning that the first clinic was a far more dangerous place to have a baby than the street.

Under the circumstances, I can hardly blame the women.