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In the spring of 1847, a maternity ward in Vienna recorded a death rate of 18.3 percent from childbed fever in a single month. After one new rule, it fell to 2.2 percent within two months, yet the doctor behind the rule was dismissed within two years.
The history of medicine is full of chance discoveries and ideas that seem obvious today but took generations to be accepted. Here are 5 facts about it, and one word, quarantine, that still carries a medieval number inside it.
1. Penicillin was discovered by accident
In 1928, scientist Alexander Fleming noticed that mold had contaminated one of his bacterial culture plates — and around the mold, bacteria weren’t growing. That casual observation led to the development of the first modern antibiotic.
Fleming confirmed the effect on September 28, 1928, and published it in 1929, but turning a curiosity into a medicine took another decade. A team at Oxford led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain purified the compound around 1940. In 1941 they treated a police officer, Albert Alexander, who improved but died when the supply ran out. Large-scale fermentation in the United States then raised output enough to cover the Normandy invasion in 1944, and Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
2. Handwashing was once rejected by medicine
In the 19th century, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis argued that doctors should wash their hands between patients to reduce infections — the idea was ridiculed by colleagues at the time, about two decades before germ theory became widely accepted.
At Vienna General Hospital, the clinic staffed by doctors and students lost around 10 percent of mothers to puerperal fever, while the midwives’ clinic lost under 4 percent. After a colleague died from a scalpel cut during an autopsy, Semmelweis suspected “cadaverous particles” carried on hands and ordered washing with chlorinated lime. Deaths in the doctors’ clinic dropped from 18.3 percent in April 1847 to about 2 percent in the following months. He could not explain why it worked, and some physicians were offended by the idea that their hands were unclean. He died in 1865, before Pasteur’s work gave his findings a theoretical footing.
3. Smallpox has been officially eradicated from the planet
Thanks to a global vaccination campaign, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1980 — the only human infectious disease ever eliminated worldwide to date.
The declaration came on May 8, 1980, from the 33rd World Health Assembly. The last person to catch the disease naturally was Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, diagnosed in October 1977. As late as 1967, WHO estimated about 15 million cases and 2 million deaths in a single year. Roughly 3 in 10 people who got smallpox died. Rinderpest, a cattle disease, became the second infectious disease declared eradicated, in 2011, but it affected animals, not humans.
4. Not every historical “epidemic” had a known cause at the time
Diseases like the Black Death, which devastated Europe in the 14th century, only had their cause (the bacterium Yersinia pestis) scientifically identified centuries later, with the development of modern microbiology.
The pandemic ran from about 1346 to 1353, and historians estimate it killed somewhere between 25 and 60 percent of Europe’s population, with overall estimates from 25 to 50 million deaths. At the time, the medical faculty in Paris blamed a planetary conjunction for a corrupted atmosphere. Alexandre Yersin identified the bacterium during a 1894 outbreak in Hong Kong, and in 2011 researchers analyzing remains from a London burial ground at East Smithfield found a strain ancestral to most modern plague strains. For more on the era, see our piece on the Black Death.
5. The placebo effect is scientifically documented
Clinical studies show that patients given an inactive treatment (placebo), while believing it’s real, can experience improvement in some symptoms — a phenomenon still used as a control in medical research today.
The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health describes it as a beneficial outcome resulting from a person’s anticipation that an intervention will help. Reviews suggest it shows up mainly in subjective measures such as pain or nausea rather than in the underlying disease itself. Some studies even find benefit when people know the pill is inert, though that research is still young. The opposite also exists: negative expectations can produce side effects from an inert treatment, called the nocebo effect. Symptoms that were unusually bad also tend to drift back toward average on their own, which is one reason trials need a placebo group to compare against.
How quarantine got its name from a 40-day wait
In 1377, the city-state of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, required arrivals from plague-affected areas to isolate before entering. The wait was first set at 30 days and later extended to 40. The word “quarantine” comes from the Italian for “forty.”
It was an early public-health rule created without anyone knowing the cause of plague; the idea was that separating arrivals for long enough would let any illness show itself. The same logic of isolation and waiting underlies modern infection control. As with every topic in this post, anyone with a health concern should talk to a qualified clinician rather than rely on history lessons.
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400 Piece All-Purpose First Aid Kit — good to have at home, in the car, or while traveling.
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Between a chlorinated-lime basin in Vienna and a 40-day wait in Dubrovnik, the oldest public-health tools were simple ones: wash, wait, and keep the sick apart.