In 1847, a Vienna doctor discovered that handwashing with chlorine could cut childbirth deaths by 90 percent, but the medical world refused to believe him

In 1847, a Hungarian obstetrician working at Vienna General Hospital found a way to stop one of the deadliest threats facing women in childbirth. By ordering doctors and medical students to wash their hands in a chlorine solution before examining patients, Ignaz Semmelweis cut deaths from childbed fever on the hospital's doctors' ward from about one mother in ten to roughly one in eighty within a year.

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