Early Life | Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 -1865) | Book Excerpt

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (July 1818–13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician and scientist, now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. […] Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives'wards.[3] He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.” Source Wikipedia , applies to the image as well.

More of biography and references at the Embryo Project Encyclopedia of the Arizona State University.

“In due course the boy Ignaz went to an elementary school. Education was then at a low ebb in Hungary, and the education of Semmelweis was from first to last upon the whole unsatisfactory. The children in a Hungarian-German Community had to make use of the two languages and Semmelweis is alleged, on by no means conclusive evidence, never to have mastered either so as to speak without dialectic accent or to write with facility in the style of a well-educated man. His schools and schoolmasters must be blamed for the deficiencies which he himself called “an innate aversion to everything which can be called writing.” That he spoke German with an accent proves nothing. Some of the most distinguished professors of his time in Vienna lectured with an unmistakable Wiener dialect. The education of the grammar school or gymnasium was just as defective in its way as that of the elementary school. The pupil was not to blame. He was a clever boy with a ready tongue, full of energy and warmth of heart and imagination which found copious expression, until, with adolescence, he was overtaken by the self-consciousness by which he lost confidence in his capacity for spoken or written language, and he even exaggerated his deficiencies. The defective school education of the physically strong and restless lad had some advantages: it did not cram him with knowledge, it did not make him prematurely a too sedative and receptive student, and it left him with a natural eye and an unsophisticated mind. He acquired no prepossessions, and he never learned how to bow down before authorities, like so many of the unfortunate young pedants whom he had to encounter as antagonists in after years. It may have been the result of want of mental discipline in early youth, or it may have been the outcome of certain idiosyncrasies of intellect and temperament, but one of the salient features in the controversial method of Semmelweis, when fighting for his doctrine, was a want of reverence for the verba magistri, and a capacity for going straight to the heart and relevant parts of a question.

Defective conventional school education had left his vision clear to see only what was to be seen, and his intellectual faculties free — so that he could think for himself and form independent judgments and logical inductions from the facts of experience.Excerpted from Semmelweis, his life and his doctrine, a chapter in the history of medicine by Sinclair, William Japp, find it online at archive.org