In 1846, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis began investigating why so many women were dying of childbed fever at a Vienna maternity hospital. He discovered that women in the ward staffed by male doctors and medical students died at a rate nearly five times higher than those in a ward staffed by female midwives.
The key difference he eventually identified was that doctors were routinely performing autopsies and then delivering babies without cleaning their hands, whereas midwives were not doing autopsies at all.
Semmelweis theorized that tiny particles from corpses were being transferred to patients. He ordered staff to wash their hands with a chlorine solution, and the rate of childbed fever fell dramatically as a result.
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Despite the clear evidence, doctors resisted washing their hands — partly because the findings implied they themselves were spreading the disease — and Semmelweis made matters worse by publicly berating those who disagreed with him. His colleagues eventually abandoned the practice, and he lost his job.
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Over the years, he grew increasingly troubled, and in 1865 was committed to an asylum where he was beaten by guards and died just 14 days later of sepsis — basically, the same disease he had spent his career fighting to prevent in those women dying of childbed fever.
Further Reading: npr.org, Wikipedia
