Matt Kaplan

Well, unfortunately, it was far worse than that.

It's amazing.

He got all of the doctors in his facility to adopt the chlorine washing mechanism and drop the rates of preparal fever.

But Semmelweis had made a lot of missteps politically.

Hungary rose up against Vienna because it didn't want to be a vassal state anymore.

And Semmelweis had openly supported the rebels against the Austrians.

And you have to remember, he was reporting to Austrian doctors.

So that did not go well.

Similarly, Semmelweis had on multiple occasions derided his supervisors who said, yeah, we have these really bad cases of preparal fever because the sun, the moon, and the stars are out of alignment.

And then Semmelweis denied.

being really not very attentive to social interaction, said, yeah, but we have the same sun, moon, and stars over both clinics, and the rate is really low in the nurse's clinic.

And he would say this in front of the politicians funding the hospital.

So it did not win him a lot of friends.

Ultimately, he was fired, even though he had dropped the rate to zero.

He was exiled back to Hungary, and eventually a group of his own peers put him into an insane asylum where he died.

And they lived happily ever after.

There you go.

Yeah, sure.

So Semmelweis was so mild-mannered in his way, and ultimately, I think, really suffered because of it.

Louis Pasteur was theatrical, right?