Ignaz Semmelweis

Ignaz Semmelweis was born in Buda, Hungary, the son of a grocer. He studied medicine in Vienna and in 1846 became an assistant in the maternity clinic of the Vienna General Hospital. The hospital had two maternity wards. In the first, run by doctors and medical students, about one in ten mothers died of childbed fever, far more than in the second, run by midwives. In 1847 a colleague died after being cut with a scalpel during an autopsy, with symptoms like those of childbed fever. Semmelweis concluded that doctors and students, who came straight from dissecting corpses, were carrying something on their hands to the mothers. He ordered them to wash their hands in a chlorine solution before examining patients, and deaths in the first ward fell dramatically. Many senior doctors rejected his idea, which came before germ theory, and his contract was not renewed. He continued his work in Budapest and published a book in 1861, but grew bitter and erratic. He was committed to an asylum in 1865 and died there two weeks later.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia