Dangerously Qualified

It's March 15th, 1840. A young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis is standing in Vienna General Hospital's maternity ward, staring at a piece of paper that's about to change his life.

The numbers don't lie: 1 in 3 women in the doctors' ward are dying from childbed fever, while next door in the midwives' ward, it's only 1 in 50. Same hospital, same city, same types of patients - but wildly different death rates. The only major difference is that doctors spend their mornings elbow-deep in cadavers before delivering babies.

Across Vienna, prestigious physicians are strutting around like peacocks in their blood-stained coats. These aren't just stains - they're badges of honor, showing how many autopsies and deliveries they've performed. In the doctors' lounge, they're having sophisticated debates about women's "sensitive constitutions" and "moral fiber" affecting mortality rates. Meanwhile, Dr. Schmidt is so confident in his expertise that he's writing a 400-page treatise on how the deaths must be caused by women's embarrassment at being examined by male doctors. Because obviously, shame is more lethal than a doctor's unwashed hands fresh from dissecting corpses.

The more Semmelweis presents his evidence, the more creative the denials become. One doctor insists the deaths in his ward are higher because his patients are "thinking too much about death" while giving birth. Another claims his mortality rate isn't concerning because the women who died were "predisposed to dying anyway." The head of surgery writes a passionate letter about how "gentlemen's hands cannot transmit disease" - apparently, medical degrees came with automatic hand sanitizing powers.

By 1846, Semmelweis implements mandatory hand washing with chlorinated lime. Death rates plummet to less than 1%. The response from his colleagues? They're offended. How dare this young upstart suggest that they, the elite of Viennese medicine, could be causing these deaths? One senior physician writes a scathing review suggesting Semmelweis should "stick to facts rather than opinions" - while completely ignoring the actual statistical facts in front of him.

Semmelweis eventually gets fired, has a mental breakdown, and dies in an asylum - ironically, from an infected wound. It would take another two decades and Louis Pasteur's germ theory for the medical establishment to finally admit that maybe, just maybe, performing autopsies and delivering babies with the same unwashed hands wasn't the brightest idea.

Another 180 years later, in a modern hospital, a doctor peels off his sterile gloves after spending twenty minutes typing up notes about a patient whose face he can't quite remember. The gloves land perfectly in the biohazard bin, right next to a stack of unread patient satisfaction surveys.