RetroFed"You are like little baby! Dead little baby. I see a lot of those too." (Ironlily)
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PugJesus
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Explanation: Soldiers often see a lot of death.
… midwives, in past eras, helping women deliver children, saw a lot of fucking death. Before the advent of modern medicine, both children and mothers very commonly died in the process of childbirth. The death rate was ~2% per birth - considering that it was normal to have numerous pregnancies and large families at the time, this could end up with a frighteningly large percentage of women dying in childbirth, with estimates ranging from 10%-30%. And midwives were there all the while, trying their best to save as many as they could with the limited tools and knowledge at their disposal.
… ‘interestingly’ enough, early in the development of modern medical practice in the 19th century AD, doctors, many of whom considered themselves of the genteel middle class, could end up causing higher mortality rates during childbirth than traditional midwives - by an entire order of magnitude. This was for a number of reasons, including the notion that reminding a ‘gentleman’ to wash his fucking hands (seeing as he’s working with sick people and, potentially, cadavers, all fucking day) was implying that he wasn’t cleanly on his own initiative, harumph harumph; and the usual pigheaded classist and sexist rejections of advice from their ‘inferiors’, including their own patients.
By ~1900, though, this had dropped to under 1% - lower than traditional midwife practices.
In modern statistics in developed countries, death in childbirth is closer to 0.02% per birth - and with much smaller families being standard on top of that.
The maternity hospitals they built in the 19th century were often dubbed “Houses of Death” because of the increase in maternal and infant deaths due to to those gentlemanly doctors and their refusal to listen to midwives.
Such a fascinating chapter of history!!
It’s Vienna hospital iirc. Two maternity wards, one staffed by doctors, the other by midwives. Everyone tried by every means imaginable to avoid being sent to the doctor’s ward because the fatality rate was so horrendous.
That wasn’t the point:
Vienna hospital hat two maternity wards: One with medical students and one where midwives were educated. The maternity ward with the medical students had significantly higher death rates among mothers and babies than the one with the midwives.
After observing that an assistant died of sepsis after cutting himself with a scalpel while carrying out an autopsy, Semmeleweis supposed that the hands of the medical students, who switched between autopsy of corpses and the maternity ward were contaminated with “ptomaine” while the midwives weren’t as they didn’t perform autopsies. This “ptomaine” did not wash off by simply using water and soap, which the students used (if they washed their hands at all). Subsequently, he advised his students to wash their hand with chlorine after performing autopsies. As a result, the death rate in his maternity ward decreased significantly.
It’s both. Midwives were sounding the alarm about handwashing as well.
“The reason seems readily apparent today, if not back then. Medical students and their professors at the elite teaching hospitals of this era typically began their day performing barehanded autopsies on the women who had died the day before of childbed fever. They then proceeded to the wards to examine the laboring women about to deliver their babies.
Dr. Semmelweis was brilliant but had two strikes against him when applying for a position at the Vienna General Hospital in 1846: he was Hungarian and Jewish. Medicine and surgery were considered to be the premier specialties in Vienna but because of his background and religion Semmelweis was relegated to running the less desirable division of obstetrics. Nevertheless, his claim to immortality was the result of an obsession with finding the means to end the childbed fever epidemics that were killing nearly a third of his patients. (The hospital ward run by midwives, without autopsy duties, had far better outcomes with their deliveries)."
The guy who suspected washing would reduce mortality (and did a study proving it) was made a laughingstock and was driven mad by his colleagues refusal to wash their god damn hands.
He was proven right eventually but I think I would go insane too if I knew it was directly causing my patients to die, and suggesting it as a way to reduce patient mortality made me into a laughingstock.
And here I thought Obstetrix was just the best friend of Asterix the Gaul….
The healthy cousin of Obelix. He mostly eats fruits and vegetables.