IL PIÙ SEMPLICE DEI GESTI Ignazio Filippo Semmelweis

The Hungarian doctor Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-1865) is the man who perhaps more than any other in the history of medicine, tried on his flesh misoneism and blindness of an entire academic world. At about twenty years of age he moved to Vienna to attend the faculty of medicine.He studied under Joseph Skoda, a distinguished clinician and the undisputed leader of Vienna Medical School, and Karl von Rokitansky, holder of the first university chair of pathological anatomy. The teachers soon realize the great talent of the young, but also the complicated character and a personality that will have a decisive role in his downfall. Semmelweis understand that the higher mortality was related to the doctors who help women to deliver and practicing autopsies with bare hands, and argues that it is precisely the vehicle of mortal infections. Even without scientific evidence but only with empirical ones, he ordered all doctors to wash their hands with a solution of calcium chloride before and after every birth and every autopsy, obtaining a dramatic drop in deaths. Lost the sympathy of his colleagues, and as a result of violent quarrels with the chief Klein, was fired in 1849 and expelled from Vienna. He played the card of international recognition by sending to Paris the manuscript Etiology of puerperal fever, summa of his work.The failure of the projects caused a violent psychological breakdown that lead to madness. He was locked in the mental hospital in Vienna, where he died August 13, 1865 after less than two weeks of hospitalization, perhaps of sepsis, possibly caused by beatings of guards