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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

“What protected those who delivered outside the clinic from these destructive unknown endemic influences?” Semmelweis mused. It was a rare opportunity to perform a “natural” experiment: two women, with the same condition, entered through two doors of the same hospital. One emerged with a healthy newborn; the other was dispatched to the morgue. Why? Like a detective eliminating potential culprits, Semmelweis made a mental list of causes, crossing them off one by one. It wasn’t overcrowding, or the women’s ages, or the lack of ventilation, or the length of their labor, or how close the beds were to one another. In 1847, Semmelweis’s colleague Dr. Jacob Kolletschka cut himself with a scalpel while performing an autopsy. He was soon febrile and septic; Semmelweis could hardly help but notice that Kolletschka’s symptoms mirrored those of the women with childbed fever. Here, then, was a potential answer: the first clinic was run by surgeons and medical students who shuttled casually between the pathology department and the maternity ward—from performing cadaver dissections and autopsies straight to delivering babies. In contrast, the second clinic was run by midwives, who had no contact with cadavers and never performed autopsies. Semmelweis wondered if the students and surgeons, who routinely examined women without gloves, were transferring some material substance—“cadaverous material,” he called it—from the decomposing cadavers into a pregnant woman’s body. He insisted that th...

As amazing as this is, it ruined his career.