ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, JózsefSemmelweis was a prominent grocer in Tabán. In 1810, at the age of thirty-two, József Semmelweis married Terézia Muller, the daughter of a prosperous coachwright who had migrated to Budapest from Bavaria. Ignaz Semmelweis, the fifth child in the family, was born 1 July 1818. On 1 July 1846, his twenty-eighth birthday, Semmelweis was appointed Johannes Klein's assistant in the first section of the Viennese maternity clinic. In the first section of the maternity clinic, Semmelweis was immediately confronted by the horrible reality of childbed fever. Because it was commonly known that the first section had a much higher mortality rate than the second, women tried to avoid being assigned there. By the late fall of 1847—about six months after he began the chlorine washings—Semmelweis was convinced that he understood the imbalance in mortality between the two sections and that conscientious washing with a chlorine solution could prevent the extra deaths.
