The REAL aberrant story of HANDWASHING! The one they don't want you to know!
Ignace Philippe Semmelweis
Born on July 1, 1818 in Ofen (today part of Budapest) and died on August 13, 1865 in Döbling near Vienna. He was a Hungarian obstetrician and «father of hand-washing».»
Even though hand-washing is now part of our daily routine and no one criticizes it when it comes to cleanliness, it wasn't always so!
The terrible truth, which should not be shouted too loudly or you'll be brought to heel by the medical authorities, is this. In the 1800s, more women died from doctor-delivered babies than from midwife-delivered babies! Even giving birth on the street without help was practically safer than giving birth with a doctor!
But how is this possible? That's what our young doctor Ignace, head of the clinic, asked himself. After much analysis and reflection, something was niggling at him. At the hospital where he practiced, the morgue was right next to the delivery rooms, and it wasn't uncommon for doctors to move from one room to the other without even washing their hands. Worse still, the same soiled instruments were used in both rooms! Today, it's easy enough to understand why 18 to 20% women died of puerperal fever after giving birth, but in this century of mankind's short life, that wasn't the case.
Semmelweis makes the connection, but doesn't yet know why? It's important to understand that the link between the infinitely small and microbes was not yet well established in those years. To put his theory into practice, he obliged all doctors and medical students to wash their hands for at least 5 minutes before each procedure.
The results are not long in coming! The mortality rate among women giving birth in his hospital dropped from 18% to 1%. Then one day, these suspicions were confirmed when a colleague died of the fever, having cut himself with a scalpel used on a corpse just before. From then on, tool washing was mandatory for all.
Wow! What a man this Ignace is. A true revolution. But not so fast, because change often means adaptation, and in some fields - particularly medicine in the 19th century - the all-powerful think they know everything, and verge on knowing the gods! The genius's superior, Mr. Semmelweis, and a number of upper-middle-class doctors totally disagreed with this new way of doing things.
He is ridiculed, and even though he stands up to all his tormentors, his contract is not renewed and he is sacked. He finds a new job in Budapest in a maternity hospital, where he implements his new precepts... He openly calls the other doctors murderers, because they don't want to wash their hands. He even writes a book on the subject, almost a vendetta against his peers.
Then one day, his colleagues took him, barely by force, to an insane asylum where he was told to inspect the premises. He never came out... He died 2 weeks later at the age of 47, on August 13, 1865, beaten and tortured by the guards because he resisted and was too violent. They put him in ice baths, force-fed him laxatives to weaken him, stocked him, tortured him...
Here's the TRUE story of hand-washing Ignace Philippe Semmelweis, revolutionary, avant-gardist, who died in an insane asylum in the 1800s for advocating that ...... washing your hands was necessary before any intervention...
Think about this story when certain doubts trouble you about humanity and its way of dealing with everything that is «out of the ordinary», new or simply different from what we know...
I like to imagine Ignatius repeating one of his favourite phrases over and over until his death:
«The world forgives you everything, except the truth».
For the VIDEO content of this blog : https://lenaturopat.com/capsules-video-naturopathiques/