In the 19th century, the mortality rate from childbed fever was high in Europe. Childbed fever was fever due to an infection in a cut made during childbirth. Since they didn’t have much knowledge on germs, childbed fever was an object of horror, driving mothers to death whether they were rich or poor.
Then, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis from Hungary insisted that washing hands before the doctors help with the childbirth could reduce the deaths of mothers. There were two delivery rooms in the hospital he worked for. One of them was where midwives worked, and the other one was where the doctors who also took care of other patients or dead bodies helped mothers deliver their babies. The delivery room where the doctors worked had drastically higher mortality rate caused by childbed fever than the other delivery room. They didn’t have clear understandings of the cause for this, but it was a proof of the necessity of the washing of the hands. However, the medical community objected his suggestion. Bloody hands were a symbol of hard-working doctors, and if his insistence was right, it would be like admitting that it was the doctors’ faults that many mothers had been sacrificed.
Now, it is common sense that doctors must keep their hands clean, and even people in general practice washing their hands frequently. In order to accept new knowledge, it requires courage to break the existing knowledge and admit that they have been wrong.