Inferring and Explaining

ChaPter seVen Semmelweis and Childbed Fever A Case Study As a simple illustration of some important aspects of scientifc inquiry, let us consider Semmelweis’ work on childbed fever. Ignaz Semmelweis, a physician of Hungarian birth, did this work during the years from 1844 to 1848 at the Vienna General Hospital. As a member of the medical staf of the First Maternity Divi- sion in the hospital, Semmelweis was distressed to fnd that a large proportion of the women who were delivered of their babies in that division contracted a serious and ofen fatal illness known as puerperal fever or childbed fever. In 1844, as many as 260 out of 3,157 mothers in the First Division, or 8.2 per cent, died of the disease; for 1845, the death rate was 6.8 per cent, and for 1846, it was 11.4 per cent. Tese fgures were all the more alarming because in the adjacent Second Maternity Division of the same hospital, which accommodated almost as many women as the First, the death toll from childbed fever was much lower: 2.3, 2.0, and 2.7 per cent for the same years. —carl hempel 1 Childbed Fever Just imagine what it must have been like to be young, poor, and pregnant in the early 1840s in Vienna and fnd yourself assigned to the First Division of the “lying in” ward at the Vienna General Hospital. Your chances of dying from a terrible disease known as childbed fever, or puerperal fever ( pere in Latin for “child” and parere for “to bring forth”), was between 10 and 20 percent. Te word on the street was that this was true, as in the halls of government that instituted a commission to study the problem, and of course the doctors were all too aware of the severity of the disaster. Childbed fever was recognized and formally identifed by Western medicine all the way back to ancient Greece. Although an obviously seri- ous medical issue, it had only reached epidemic 57