I stood at the clinical white sink and depressed the pedal with my right foot. Hot water streamed from the spigot and hit my hands. I began scrubbing. Three minutes to be exact -— all the way up to the elbows. I was being watched. This is the protocol here at the hospital where my newborn is currently receiving care.
As I settled into a comfortable washing rhythm I began thinking about how this very procedure was once scoffed and ridiculed. And, yet, now it is completely accepted. It’s common sense. And in this case, required. Dr. Semmelweis would have been proud.
Too bad he never got the accolades he deserved during his lifetime. In fact, he got quite the opposite.
It was during the mid-19th century that Hungarian obstetrician, Dr. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, who oversaw two teaching obstetric clinics in an Austrian hospital, couldn’t help but notice that “Clinic Number One” had a substantially higher death rate from an affliction known as childbed fever than did “Clinic Number Two” — more than four times higher. Pregnant women were literally “begging” to be admitted to the safer Clinic Number Two. Some, to avoid being admitted to the first, opted to have their babies in the streets. What puzzled Semmelweis even further was that women involved in “street births” rarely died from childbed fever.
Being a man of science, Semmelweis attempted to deduce these destructive influences of childbed fever by evaluating the two clinics side by side. Everything was the same except that Clinic Number One was a teaching clinic for medical students and Clinic Number Two, a teaching clinic for midwives.
Still stumped, the light bulb didn’t illuminate until his good doctor-friend unexpectedly died of childbed fever himself. It was then that Semmelweis postulated perhaps the medical students were carrying “cadaverous particles” on their hands when they would come to examine and deliver their pregnant patients after having performed their morning autopsies in the next room over.
Semmelweis in a moment of inspiration decided all medical students delivering babies in his ward would wash their hands in a chlorine solution after dissecting corpses, and after each patient examination.
The results of his change in procedure were stunning. Prior to the hand washing, one out of every eight women giving birth in his clinic was dying of childbed fever. After the hand washing started: the death rate plummeted immediately to less than one in a hundred!
Semmelweis published his remarkable findings. Truly, he had stumbled across something that would change the course of medicine. Instead of being met with applause, he was hit with insults. The orthodox obstetricians virtually declared war on the doctor, relentlessly attacking him at every opportunity. He died without ever knowing that his views would eventually be adopted as standard protocol.
But why would the medical establishment dismiss something so obvious? Why did they not believe in hand washing? Because doing so would be admitting that by their own hand they were spreading the fatal infection.
Jules Eisenbud once wrote, “Let something appeal to us and we will make sense out of it. Let something offend us, disturb us, threaten us, and we’ll see that it doesn’t make sense.”
I guess that’s what it really boils down to: If something works and shows merit, are you willing rearrange, even change, your philosophical construct, or do you go out of your way to demonize and derail it?
My three minutes at the scrub station were complete. With hands clean, I was now able to hold and dote on my daughter. And I did what every good chiropractor-father should do. I checked her spine and adjusted her. Because for me, it’s right up there with washing hands.
— Dr. Thomas R. Lamar is a chiropractor at Anchor Chiropractic in the Health Services Center and hosts the Internet radio program SpinalColumnRadio.com. Lamar can be reached at 360-297-8111.
