1847 A.D.:  Ignaz Semmelweis is 'crucified' for being right!

 

 

  This is a summation of one of the most impacting true stories that I have ever read.  It taught me a real lesson about certain inherent flaws that can sometimes govern the behavior of large prestigious groups. 

  Today, a large portion of the men and women of science tell us, directly at times but mostly indirectly, that the Holy scriptures have been disproven or that important parts of them have been.  They declare that the Earth has been around for billions of years, and this they know to be a fact.  They say that a process called Evolution created the life forms we see...not some quaint god myth called Yahweh, and this they know to be fact.  They proclaim themselves to be on a truer and surer path than those who would trust that Jesus is Who He said He was.  Their crossover from 'explorers of God's Creation' to 'disprovers of God' made them a key component of Satan's plan to mislead man......but, at the probable cost of their souls if they continue in their delusion of themselves and others.  

  Read about how masterful and Godlike the great men of Western medicine felt themselves to be only 170 years ago, and yet how totally and shamefully wrong they found out they were.  Yet, there were no apologies to the damaged, the victimized, and the dead.  They merely made a quiet correction in their misleading, and continued on as if nothing had happened, still proclaiming their masterful expertise in their fields.       

 

Ignaz Semmelweis

 

  In Eve's Day, upon kicking the First Couple out of the Garden, God told Eve that her pain would be increased in childbirth.  But it is a woman's unrescinded command from God to bring forth children.  (Though, if she wishes to serve God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, that is also a way to bring forth children.... spiritual children.)

  Women don't think much of that 'bring forth children' idea these days (most women I know of) and are sometimes indignant and insulted if it is implied that their important proper function is the birthing and raising of children.  But God, who knows all, knew what He wanted the Man to do (and He told him) and He knew what He wanted the Woman to do (and He told her) and He told the Serpent that had talked Eve into eating from the forbidden tree what it was that it's life would henceforth be like also.  Genesis Chapter 3:

¹³ Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

¹⁴ So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

¹⁶ To the woman he said,

¹⁷ To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

  Women are not forbidden from doing all other things, not by any means.  Proverbs chapter 31 describes what a noble and worthy wife and mother could be like, and, as is plain, she engages in many activities, including managing servants and being a small businesswoman.  But....by God's specific command woman are to bring forth children.  Don't blame men for that...it is from God.  And don't hate the sayer for saying it...it's from God.  Women of today are taught from many sources to think of child bearing and child raising as the sad fate of the oppressed and downtrodden woman who is not allowed to pursue her occupational dreams.  But that isn't something God has ever taught.  Not ever. 

  Such things as a rewarding career may come to women, but the commanded thing is to bring forth children.  Just as the Church must reach the unreached though it is tough and often thankless, and often unrewarded work here on Earth, nevertheless, that is the Church's job.  It's not our job to seek more exciting worldly activities.  We are supposed to save the souls of sinners from going to damnation by telling them who Jesus is and what He did for them.  Unglamorous seeming to some, but very very important to the sinner, and to the Lord, just like a woman's work of giving birth to children and raising them is important to the Lord though many moms will admit that it is grueling and unglamorous at times - at many times!   

  And, technically (I suspect literally as well) a woman who dies in the service of God, killed by the dangers of giving birth because she attended to her duty of birthing children, has done essentially the same thing as a martyred missionary that has been killed trying to spread the Gospel.  Both were doing the thing they were told by God to do.  I personally suspect that God has crowns of martyrdom (if there are such) for Christian women who die giving birth, because He is a just God, and knows that a pregnant Christian woman is like a servant strapped to the front of a freight train.  She has to endure what is coming, and she knows that it can sometimes lead to death, yet she knows that God charged the woman with bringing forth children.  Naturally she has her own desires for children as well in most instances, but even so...it is a worthy and dangerous holy undertaking, this bringing forth of children for God. 

  This was a command of God in the Book of Genesis, not a command of Jesus, so I believe that Jewish women and perhaps others who believe that the God of Abraham commands them to have children may quite reasonably be considered similarly, though Christians know from Jesus' mouth that only through faith and belief in Him can any man or woman be saved.  So that is a wrinkle in the idea that wiser heads will have to work out.  But God does say here..."I will make your pains in childbearing very severe, with painful labor you will give birth to children..."  "...you will give birth..."  Is that what God's saying?  Isn't He commanding the woman, as well as describing to her how the experience will be?

  At the same time he was also (I believe) alluding typologically to a future bride of His Son who would be known as the Church, but that's speculation.  Yet during persecutions, the church grows most quickly.  Bringing forth children in pain?

  So, the woman is commanded (almost cursed, one might say, just because God spoke these words to Adam and Eve when He was pretty disappointed with them) to bring forth children in pain.  And the pain would be severe.  And that is her lot, as a sinful creature, from God.  She has her path, Adam has his.  And walking together as they go, they each have their own job to complete.  But though childbirth is commanded to be difficult, it needn't often be fatal.  God made women's bodies to be quite capable of childbirth, though it be painful childbirth.  Healthy women should seldom die giving birth.

  Yet, in the 1800's women were dying in horrific numbers during childbirth.  Astounding numbers!  They were going to the fairly recently introduced 'birthing hospitals' (these hospitals began to appear in the 1600's, so they had been around a while in some areas) so that they could bring forth their children in as risk free and highly assisted of an environment as possible, advantaged by the vast wisdom of scientifically learned medical men.  And yet these women were dying of a sickness, a certain terrible disease, which these colossuses (colossi?) of learning had named 'Childbed Fever' or more Latinly 'Puerperal Sepsis fever'  It killed an astounding 15% to 30% of women who gave birth at some of the finer birthing hospitals, and severe episodic outbreaks of childbed fever occurred, at times, which killed nearly every mother that entered the hospitals to give birth.  

  No one had previously realized what a fearsome risk it was to give birth to a child.  These women were facing odds very similar to the beach landing at Normandy during WWII.  And those brave soldiers were quite willing to say they faced frightening odds that day.  It is literally true that going to a birthing hospital where the 'child bed fever' was present to deliver your baby was more dangerous than fighting in most war zones.   

  It was completely common knowledge that women died in childbirth at times, of course, but until these birthing hospitals or birthing wings in these teaching hospitals began to be instituted, no one had apparently kept good statistics to realize how hazardous giving birth actually was.  And that was the hazard level when you were in the masterful care of the brightest and most powerful medical minds!  Imagine how high the death rate from child bed fever must be elsewhere, where the poor women who weren't admitted to the great hospitals had to lay down somewhere simple and plain and - unaided by science - just deliver her baby! 

  But no one was out there gathering the statistical data, so one could only guess how it was out there in the countryside where women gave birth in their homes.  (It has been decided by some of the sources that I read, from data now gathered from those times, that women having babies at home died at a rate of about 5 of every 1,000.  A 16% mortality rate at a hospital obviously equates to 160 deaths for every 1,000.  Being a pregnant woman in a doctor's care at one of these birthing hospitals would, using these numbers, force you to face 32 times the normal risk of death.  But they thought they were lucky to have a hospital to deliver at!!) 

  The great minds of medicine in Europe and America and elsewhere, working in these newly implemented birthing wards, publicized the shocking statistics, and the race was on to identify and learn to treat this great murderer of new mothers, this dangerous nemesis called childbed fever.  And great indeed would be the name and renown of the man who crushed this vicious foe.  The University which housed that hospital, and that doctor would also get to bask in the reflected glory of such a medical advance as curing this dreadnought of maternal deaths.  It began to be a chief focus of medical research and speculation, and all that seemed clear at first to nearly all of these great and learned men was that it was a disease brought on by an imbalance of the four humors of the human body which ruled the health of mankind. 

***The great doctors of the age recognized - because of their impressive and profound learning - that Hippocrates had been spot on when he had declared that 4 great liquid substances within the human body ruled our health, and if one of them became hindered, or diminished in volume or strength, then sickness resulted.  It was Black Bile, Yellow Bile, Phlem, or Blood which was out of whack when a person became sick, and it was a doctor's job to bring the offending humor back into balance. ***

  Into this competitive race to find the cure came a young Hungarian doctor, a fifth child out of ten, and a man born on July 1st of 1818 in Buda Hungary (part of Buda-Pest) His name was Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis.  He was Catholic educated in his early school years, and had finished out his medical education there in Vienna, Austria.  He obtained a job at the University Teaching Hospital in Vienna in 1844 as Assistant Lecturer in the First Obstetrics Division.

 

Period depiction of the University Teaching Hospital of Vienna 

 

  There were 2 obstetrics divisions, as the title implies; in the first, doctors and 'doctors in training' tended to the expecting mothers after their morning medical routines.  In the second, which trained midwives, usually only midwives tended to the expecting mothers.  Actual Physicians normally left the 2nd Obstetrics Division alone, letting the quite capable midwives handle matters there. 

  Becoming familiar with the hospital, the two divisions, and the normal everyday routines there, young Dr. Semmelweis became just sick from seeing the number of young mothers who came there to give birth but who then died.  He, like so many in medicine during that day, began to study the problem and seek the cause, and hopefully then a cure.  But....he was a pretty open-minded young doctor.  He wasn't too deeply invested in the 'adjusting 4 humours' idea.  He observed, he puzzled over the problem, he began to keep statistics, and a strange thing began to come to his attention.  The Second division, run by midwives, had nowhere near as many deaths as the First division, which was run by learned doctors.  And as it turned out, that was no great secret in Vienna. 

  One of their chief customer groups at the birthing hospital was the prostitutes...and the prostitutes had formerly had the practice of murdering their babies because they were accidentally conceived and an inconvenience to their line of work.  So, to stem this horrible infanticide, the hospital had begun to offer something like free extended medical care to women who came there to have their babies.  So, a prostitute who had her baby at the hospital and then left it there now could receive some forms of medical care for an extended period afterwards.  And that was useful to the pregnant prostitutes, so they, as well as many ordinary pregnant women who just wanted a safer delivery, used the hospital instead of having their babies at home.  A good permanent home would be later sought for the prostitutes' babies. 

  These prostitutes, it is reported, had already noticed that a whole lot more women died in Division 1 when giving birth, where the doctors and 'doctors in training' worked, than in division 2, where the midwives and midwives in training took care of you and the doctors ordinarily did not help you.   So large of a difference had been noted among the prostitute community - who were more often local, often talked among themselves, and could more closely compare notes - that there were occasions when prostitutes who were directed to go to division 1 would collapse to their knees and literally beg to be taken to division 2 instead.  Or they would give 'street birth' there just in front of the hospital (avoiding both divisions) because if the hospital knew that you had given birth outside on the street while trying to get yourself to the hospital to be admitted, then they would still let you have the extended medical care that came as a usual result of birthing at the hospital.  But the main point is women in the know feared Division 1, where the real doctors worked!

  And you couldn't blame them.... child bed fever brought on a painful puss ridden horrible smelling discharge from the reproductive pathways, tumor-like growths in the abdomen, and a high fever, usually leading to death, all within a short time of contracting the illness.  Not an attractive illness.   

  Young Dr. Semmelweis began to compare everything that he could about the differences between Division 1 where there was around a 16% death rate, and division 2, where there was around a 2% death rate.  He painstakingly began to eliminate the routines that were followed and the practices in place at Division 1 which were also equally in practice at Division 2.  And after a time he felt he had narrowed it down; it seemed that it was something to do with the doctor's' daily routines. 

  Semmelweis noticed that midwives and doctors had many similarities in their routines, but some differences.  Midwives weren't really involved in the wider field of medicine and pathology, for instance.  They basically just worked with mothers giving birth. 

  Doctors, on the other hand, used the mornings to increase their knowledge base by performing autopsies on the people (many were these same new mothers) that had died the previous day.  So, you showed up at the hospital, reached around with your hands all over the insides of various decaying dead bodies to see what you could learn about what had killed them, and then afterwards you went to the maternity area and used your hands to see how near to giving birth these expecting mothers were.  And oh, by the way, you didn't wash your hands as a rule.  Why should you?  Germs and all such micro-organisms were still unknown, and blood and gore were just part of a doctor's life.  Your doctor's coat, your hands....they were always covered with 'stuff'.  It was almost a matter of pride!  Here are some quotes that one of the sources I looked at posted, from medical personnel of that time:

  "In those dates physicians operated in blood stiffened frock coats - the stiffer the coat, the prouder the busy surgeon."

 "...pus was as inseperable from surgery as blood."

  ......and from a Sir Frederick Traves: "There was no object in being clean.  Indeed, cleanliness was out of place.  It was considered finicking and affected.  An executioner might just as well manicure his nails before chopping off the head." 

  In those days, cleanliness was not next to Godliness.  It was next to ignored.

  So, today we may find ourselves aghast at the idea, but Dr. Semmelweis was making a mighty mental leap for his time when he concluded that there might just be a deadly connection between scrounging your hands around in the bodies of decaying dead people, wiping your hands off with a towel, and then going up to see how dilated the cervixes were on your expectant mothers.  And also, during this time period when Semmelweis was putting it all together, one of his friends was nicked with a dirty scalpel during an autopsy, and soon died...oddly, from an infection that seemed similar to Child Bed fever.

  In truth, he was not the first man anywhere to make the connection.  A Scottsman in 1795, and an American physician only a few years before Semmelweis had both made the mental connection and had voiced their beliefs.  Perhaps unknown others had as well.  

  But little had come from it.  And they had not pursued it. 

  Hating the deaths with all of his heart and daring to be laughed at for so silly an experiment, Semmelweis gained permission from his skeptical superiors to test the theory.  He believed that some sort of "morbid poison" was remaining on the hands after the autopsies were completed.  It was 'dirty hands' that seemed the culprit. 

  He settled on a hand washing cleanser composed of a concentrated chlorinated lime solution, and he imposed some very strange rules upon the doctoral staff:  they would wash their hands in the cleansing solution after their morning autopsies were performed, and before checking the cervical dilation of their expectant mothers.  Additionally, when they had examined one expectant mother, they would again wash their hands prior to examing the next expectant mother. (Yes, unfortunately that really had been the practice!  Urghhh!!)  They were to wash until the smell of death, of the rotting corpses, no longer remained upon their hands.....when they could not smell it, then they had washed enough.   

  The results of his experiment were astounding!! Incredible!!  In Division 1, the 16% death rate dropped to less than 3%, and it stayed there.  The hand washing, through whatever means, was saving lives and in a really big way.  Child bed fever could be managed....could be beaten away!  These women, these mothers, no longer had to die in such horrible numbers and in such pain.  It seemed that the thing which every great obstetrical physician of eminence was searching for had been found, and by this unknown, unimpressive seeming Hungarian physician working in Austria, no less.  The dread enemy was defeated!!     

  Was the hospital proud?  Were his superiors deliriously excited?  Were the doctors who were now washing their hands and seeing such good results convinced!

  No, no, and partly.

  The answer, as all of the great medical names knew, lay with an imbalance of humors.  This crack-pot theory of hand washing - though it may have coincided with a great reduction in Child Bed fever deaths - could hardly have affected the balance of the bodily humors.  And, if one did happen to believe the claims of this young upstart Semmelweis, he seemed to be implying that they - the Medical Doctors - had been acting in error, and that it was they, the Medical Doctors, who had, more or less, been responsible for killing these ten thousands of women for all of these years.  No one wanted that sort of charge laid at their door.  And besides, as a certain Dr. Charles Meigs was to famously respond to this ludicrous new idea of hand sanitation:  "Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen's hands are clean!"

  Semmelweis' students began to graduate and disseminate to other hospitals in other places, and they knew what they had seen.  Some of them wrote papers in defense of the effectiveness of hand sanitation, and a few places listened, but the overall reaction was 'who are you to try to convince us of something as ludicrous as this?!?"  And when the greatest men in medicine sneered at the thought, then the 'wished that they were in that group' bunch did too, and acting as a pack, a clique, a gang, a lynch mob, they ridiculed Semmelweis and his ideas as nearly to death as they could.  And they simply refused to adopt his newly proposed and successfully tested practices, despite however many women would die.  After all, professional reputations and collegiate respect and all such matters that pertained to the gigantic, stinking, heartless barbaric evil of human pride were at stake here!!  Great men do not much care to be told that they are wrong by little men!  It is simply not to be tolerated.  They would continue searching for the cure to child bed fever from the sources that they had predicted would provide the answer:  the four humors!  Unless it could be found from there, it needn't be found at all. 

  A stunned Semmelweis exhibited his seemingly bullet proof data time and again, but the mob composed of his scientifically educated peers had set their brow against him.  His answer cast them in too odious a light, and it could not be tolerated.

  The life of Semmelweis from this point on was largely on the down slide.  He is never described as having been an especially well mannered man, but in fact he apparently met criticism of his ideas with great anger and indignation.  He was apparently willing to yell at his superiors over their skepticism of his conclusions.  He may have been just a little bit 'mad' acting even from early years, in fact. 

  He left this university and found another:  St. Rochus in Buda-Pest.  He re-proved his theory at that hospital with similar astoundingly exciting results, and they were more accepting of his findings, but nearly everywhere else, and still in Vienna, his name was disparaged and his theories laughed at.  The powers that be were not to be swayed by unassailable data.  They were not going to become 'hand washers'!  And women - young mothers from every walk of life - died in numbers that broke the heart of Ernst Semmelweis, and drove him even madder.

  He was deeply affected by his rejection and the maternal price of it all to the point - some claim - of literal clinical madness, his mind tortured by the cruelty of his peers and the wicked, self-loving, other-hating hardness of their hearts, by the vile wickedness of their egos.  His behaviors became more and more erratic, people said.  He wrote harsh things about the famous obstetric doctors of his day who disparaged his findings.  He shouted at medical people that would not listen to him, calling them names.  His family suffered too from his behavioral changes; he was married with 5 children.  

  Eventually there came a day when he was lured by 'concerned acquaintances' into a mental asylum under false pretenses, and there he was grabbed and taken into custody after quite a fight.  Within a few weeks of his incarceration in the asylum a cut that he had received on his hand when fighting became infected, and he is believed to have died of a septic infection soon afterwards.  He died rejected by the very people that should have celebrated his name, a broken man that had solved one of medicine's most vexing problems thus saving great numbers of lives, he died shut up in an crazy house and hated by the world that he had dared disagree with.  Such was the sad and seemingly unfair end of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who first introduced the use of dermal antiseptics to medical sanitation standards.

  Yet, it was only a handful of years later that his ideas were being validated in many places by numerous pioneers of the antiseptic movement, such as Lister (of Listerine fame).  The medical field was forced to adopt it...its truth was simply too evident.  And death rates fell tremendously in many fields of medicine.  It's hard to estimate just how many of us are alive today because when one of our ancestors went to the hospital, they lived and did not die solely because of the antiseptic procedures that were followed by their doctors and nursing staff.

  Dr. Semmelman's body was moved to Buda-Pest in 1891, and they went on to erect a statue of him (not that statues are good!) there in 1894.  Too little, too late, but something.    

  And why should this sad story be on the Deeds of God website?  Because the great men of science stand united against truth yet again today, in our time, as vicious and hard hearted a mob of self serving evil-doers as ever they were before.  People are dying again, and it is their doing again.  But this time it is hundreds of millions that die. 

  These scientists have seen that only a God with the mind and vision of a God could have conceived the complexities and beauties that they have found in creation - both in the living creatures and in the wonderous setting for it all.  And yet, to admit it would mean that they would need to admit that they had been wrong, had been teaching wrong long after it became obvious that it was wrong, and that they had steered many, many generations of trusting school children away from a belief in God, and away from a belief in God's Son Jesus, who said that He was man's final and only path to reconciliation with our Creator, the Holy Father and Maker of All, Yahweh!

  Science today has the same conundrum as those of Semmelweis' day:  save face or save lives?  And the same hard, cold, vain unloving pride that prevented those of Semmelweis' day from relenting and coming around seems to have an iron hold on the scientists of our own day.  Like the ancient day Priests of Ba'al they stand in a group in communal opposition to their very own Creator, and pretend not to see, refusing to acknowledge because of the credibility that it will cost them.  Well, God help their souls, and God forbid that the hundreds of millions of trusting little ones who's minds are trained in the ways of their scientific error should become lost souls themselves.

  Pregnant women of Semmelweis' day, you were right to yell and plead not to fall into the hands of such people back then.  And Woman of today...yes, you, Church....you need to make sure, with all of your strength, that your own young are not delivered into such hands as these.  May God Almighty guide us!  Praise and thanks to the Lord of Salvation. 

  Scientists....pay heed to your soul and break ranks with your misled peers if you are given the discernment to see that you should.  They won't be of any help to you once they are there, standing in the Lake of Fire that is given to the wicked as an eternal home.  Why stand there with them?  You don't have to.  Aren't you honestly smart enough to see that so wonderous and complex a thing as the Creation did not fall together by unguided random chance?  If you can see that it did not, then save your soul.  Honestly, save your soul.  Step away from those who oppose God themselves, and who beyond that have misguided others that would love to have found God.  Honestly, be a scientist...but:  believe the evidence!!  Step away, stand up for your Lord, and save your soul while you can. 

  Attribute the wonders of Creation to God!  Testify to your God, that others may believe all the more because of you.  Attribute things to their rightful source, and tell others that you are a scientist, yet you believe in Jesus.  Do not lie and steal credit from the Holy Maker of it all.  And do not remain silently embedded in a mob of God hating evildoers who derive their living by delving into the wonders that Yahweh, great and holy, has created, even while they deny His very existence and encourage others to do likewise.

  Scientists, time and again the 'cutting edge knowledge' of science proudly felt itself to know the truth when it was later shown to be in great and harmful error.  Time and again.  Their position on 'what is truth' has shifted more than the sands of the Arabian dunes, and yet they have learned no lesson what so ever from all of these mispronouncements.  They still cry out loudly that they represent enlightenment and should be followed instead of God.  But it is only Satan, working in their hearts, that closes their eyes to the growing evidence:  something intelligent beyond all ability to grasp it conceived of the natural world that we see.  We can explore it, but never could have conceived of it.  It works well together, it follows rules, it is based on principals, and it is inherently imbued with beauty and innovative concepts that take away the breath at times.  Nature obeys the Mighty One, was created by the Mighty One, and reflects the Mighty One.  That is why Satan so longs to steal credit away from its Author.....because there is so very much glory revealed in its every largest and smallest design feature. 

  Anyone who takes the time to look at it can only really conclude that whoever made it is fully beyond compare.  And Satan's pride does not like being relegated to a shoddy second string position.  He aches for the glory which is God's, and the fame which is God's, and the worship that is rightfully God's.  And he will tell any necessary lie to obtain it.  He can do nothing for any man in the long run....he can only drag your soul to hell, a place of shame that he himself will one day reside in forever.  So, scientists, wake up!  Don't count yourselves as the only ones that see the truth.  You are in fact the ones that are always having to restate the truth.  Think about that....you are always having to re-explain your earlier assertions of how things work.  Doesn't that hint to you that you are blind guides?  In many many ways you have been, and the consequences have been deadly.  Just as the supposed doctors of Ignaz Semmelweis' time were actually instruments of death to those who were trying to bring forth children, so too you have been instruments of death to the Church (many in the Christian Church think that science has disproven God's Word) and they lose their faith, and are unable to bring forth new children (new believers) to God.  They are effectively 'killed' in a spiritual sense.  And it is often the scientific community which does this.

  Science neither blinks an eye nor issues an apology no matter how many times they change their story, but their story always holds it to be true that there is no God, Jesus was but a man if He even existed at all, and humans are just rational beings that rose by accident from the dark muck of the primordial ages.  It's a ludicrous position, but you scientists prefer any position to one that gives God His due.  What spirit is it, do you think, that inhabits your community, which makes you able to be so blind?  What allows you to imagine yourselves the only bearers of truth and light no matter how many times you must rewrite your own false story of how things actually work?  Why does it never occur to you that if you are always having to correct yourself, then perhaps you should just be students of One that actually is qualified to teach...and I refer to Jesus!  It honestly can only be the spirit of Satan, working within you unbeknownst even to yourselves, that drives you to such conceit in light of your ever failed history as bearers of the light of truth.  No other spirit hates God to such a degree!

  As the Viennese doctors denied truth to save face, no matter how many people died because of their denial, so also do you scientists do exactly the same thing.  There is blood on your hands, and it is not the blood of tens of thousands.  It is the blood of perhaps a billion, and that number still grows. 

  Scientists, inside of yourselves some of you already know this:  God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the real truth, and real science will always be compatible.  Always!!