Google Honors The Doctor Who Showed Why It Is Important To Wash Your Hands

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

The company Google joined the campaigns carried out by international health organizations on the importance of washing hands frequently to avoid viral infections such as COVID-19.

How did they do it? In the graphic art of the main page of the internet search engine, Google has highlighted the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who is credited with having discovered in the 19th century that washing hands helped prevent an illness from passing from person to person.

Google also shares that Semmelweis was dedicated to finding the cause of childhood fever that raised maternal mortality rates in Europe. In his investigations, he discovered that doctors were transmitting infections from previous operations and autopsies to susceptible mothers through their hands.

Today, Semmelweis is widely remembered as 'the father of infection control', credited with revolutionizing not only obstetrics, but also the medical field, informing generations beyond his own that handwashing is one of the most common ways. effective to prevent the spread of diseases”, Google quotes on its page.

The technology giant notes that despite its important finding, its theories were taken with skepticism and it took several decades for its hygienic recommendations to be validated by widespread acceptance of the "germ theory of disease," which It proposes that microorganisms are the cause of a wide range of diseases.

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Semmelweis was born in Budapest, Hungary on July 1, 1818, and earned a doctorate from the University of Vienna and a master's degree in midwifery. On a day like today, in 1847, he was appointed Chief Resident at the maternity clinic of the Vienna General Hospital, where he carried out his deductions and field studies.