Matt Kaplan

So he tried feeding the patients in the doctor's ward the food that was being delivered to the nurse's ward.

No change.

I mean, it was a legitimate question, right?

I mean, what was causing it?

Then he tried burning all the sheets in the doctor's ward and replacing them with sheets from the nurse's ward.

No dice.

He went so far as to note that the priest in the temple that was adjacent to the hospital, he would walk through with incense and a bell every day when patients were dying.

And since more patients were dying in the doctor's ward, he thought, well, maybe the incense causes preparal fever.

So he had a word with the priest and said,

Could you not go in here for three or four months?

I just want to take some notes.

And the priest listened.

None of this worked.

Then one morning, Semmelweis was in the morgue, as doctors back in that day did.

Their habit every morning all across the world was to go down and to dissect the patients who had died the previous day to better understand why they might have died.

It's a noble task, right?

And when he finished, he washed up with soap and water, and he smelled his hands.

And he thought, my hands still smell of corpse.

Is there, because no one had any idea about bacteria back in the day, no clue.

Is there an aura of death that is contaminating my hands from the corpse that then when I go and deliver a baby is infecting the birth canal?