Author: Abikenova Ayazhan
The purity of the hands, the banal principles of hygiene were alien until the middle of the nineteenth century, even in medicine. Due to the importance of this issue, we think you would be interested to know where the idea of «keeping your hands clean» came from.
The Egyptians were prevalent with hygiene of body and contact items. Another 1,000 to 1,500 prior to n.e the doctors assumed that the dirt on the hands of the medical staff could be transferred to the sick and vice versa, so Egyptian doctors believed that hygiene was already half the job. And in nineteenth-century Europe, doctors could go into labor after autopsies without even washing their hands, increasing mortality in patients, especially women, during childbirth.
In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, made a global change by offering to all physicians the use of a chlorine lime solution as disinfectant. After the medical officer cut himself with a scalpel during the autopsy and died shortly afterwards, Semmelweis proposed a hypothesis. According to the report, excretions from the corpse or particles from the body caused the fever, which caused the deaths of people, including medical personnel and women in childbirth.
To test this assumption, some doctors began to process the hands and tools with a chlorine lime solution. As a result, maternal mortality had fallen from 20 per cent to 1 percent. However, there were also opponents of Semmelweis - doctors from the middle and high social classes considered themselves to be fairly clean and the requirement to wash hands before each procedure and the patient were considered humiliation. In the end, Semmelweis' idea was strongly opposed by the medical community, which tried to prevent the spread of his disinfection technique. One of his companions, the German physician Gustav Mihaelis, put the idea into practice and achieved good results, but due to the influence of the medical community, his very close man died of ferocity when at a difficult time he was unable to use his experience and knowledge. The realization of helplessness, the inability to do anything for this man forced Gustav to commit suicide. Semmelweis himself was deceived and placed in a madhouse near Vienna, any attempt to escape and prove his adequate condition forced the hospital staff to use tranquilizers and straitjackets. This situation did not break Semmelweis and he made every effort to escape, as a result of which he was constantly beaten, placed in a dark room, and treatment changed to laxative and pouring cold water. After two weeks, Semmelweis died at the age of 47.
Over the next 40 years, concepts and attitudes about microbes and infections changed in the course of numerous observations, and hand hygiene did begin to be used. This decision has a chronological dynamic: in the '50s, Mr. Louis Pasteur introduced pasteurization in the '70s. Lister discovered antiseptic treatments, and at the end of the century, nurse Florence Nightingale set standards for hospital care, after which mortality rates were reduced to a minimum.
Interestingly, such a routine and routine process in the modern world came through the centuries of medical society and the sacrifices of the smartest people of its time, despite the existence of preconditions and positive results of experiments. To date, Ignaz Semmelweis is the main founder of aseptic, a complex of activities that prevents microbes from entering an open wound. Thanks to his sacrifice, everyone now understands that cleanliness is the key to health, and we do not die of small wounds from the resulting sepsis.
27/06/2020
