Gink & Go Dialogues

Setting: Gink & Go are good friends who are studying biology. They are up late in their dorm room after the first biology lecture studying.

Gink:		Who is that Simmerbody character that Saupe was blabbering about today in biology class?
Go:		Semmelweis. Not Simmerbody. His name was Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis and he was a Hungarian physician in the mid 1800’s.
Gink:		Whatever. I love his name – Ignaz – but, like why should I care?
Go:		Good question. Semmelweis realized that childbed fever, a disease, was common among women who delivered a baby in the hospital clinic.
Gink:		Is that the disease caused by Streptococcus pyogenes?
Go:		Right, it’s the same one that killed Muppeteer Jim Henson and made the news as the “face-eating bacteria.”
Gink:		So what did this Semmelweis actually do?
Go:		Well, he realized that childbed fever, which was also called puerperal fever, was passed from physicians to their patients.
Gink:		How in the heck did he figure that out?
Go:		He had gotten his medical degree in obstetrics and midwifery from the university of Vienna in 1844. He practiced at the Vienna General hospital that had two clinics. He noted the following: (*check out the data in the table*)

	First Clinic	Second Clinic
Staffed by	Med students & physicians	Midwives
Mortality	High	low
Day Patients admitted	SSTTh	MWF
Delivery practices	Same	Same
Other activities	Autopsies, exam sick patients, physicals exams	No autopsies

Gink:		So he wondered why there was a higher death rate in the First Clinic at the hospital?
Go:		Yeah right! He figured it had to do with physicians transferring diseases particles from cadavers and infecting healthy patients
Gink:		So what did he do?
Go:		He ordered the hospital staff to wash their hands with chloride of lime (calcium chloride) before examining any patient.
Gink:		And did it work?
Go:		You bet. The death rate in the First Clinic dropped like one of Saupe’s dumb jokes. But the sad thing is that no one believed him.
Gink:		You don’t mean that they stopped washing their hands and the women began to die again?
Go:		That’s right.
Gink:		How come – didn’t he publish his work?
Go:		Not until it was too late and then it was rather incoherent.
Gink:		You mean like one of Saupe’s lectures?
Go:		Uh, right. The other problem is that people were still not ready to abandon their miasma and spirit paradigm for the cause of disease.
Gink:		Oh right – I forgot that he was working nearly two decades before Pasteur formulated the germ theory of disease.
Go:		Well, it’s getting late so let’s answer these questions Saupe gave us for homework so we can hit the hay.
Gink:		Groan (*say it loudly*)