Semmelweis Museum: Birthplace of the Saviour of Mothers

Why is it significant?

You are on Apród utca, a quiet street at the foot of Castle Hill, in front of a pale Baroque house with a steep roof and a small garden behind it. On 1 July 1818 a boy was born here, Ignác Semmelweis, the son of a well-to-do grocer whose shop downstairs was known as the White Elephant.

Key Facts

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You are on Apród utca, a quiet street at the foot of Castle Hill, in front of a pale Baroque house with a steep roof and a small garden behind it. On 1 July 1818 a boy was born here, Ignác Semmelweis, the son of a well-to-do grocer whose shop downstairs was known as the White Elephant. Hungarian doctors and nurses still celebrate his birthday as their professional day. Fast-forward to Vienna in the 1840s. The young Semmelweis works in the maternity wards of the General Hospital and notices something terrible. In the clinic run by doctors and medical students, mothers die of childbed fever far more often than in the clinic run by midwives. Then a colleague cuts his finger during an autopsy and dies with the same symptoms as the mothers. Semmelweis realises the doctors themselves are carrying death on their hands, straight from the dissecting room. In 1847 he orders everyone to wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before touching a patient. Deaths fall dramatically, to around one or two in a hundred. It is one of the simplest and most important discoveries in the history of medicine... and almost nobody believes him. Germ theory did not yet exist, and many senior doctors were offended at the idea that they were the problem. Semmelweis grew bitter and wrote furious open letters to his critics. In 1865 he was taken to an asylum near Vienna and died there two weeks later, aged forty-seven. Only after Pasteur and Lister did the world catch up with him. Today the medical university of Budapest bears his name, and his remains rest in the garden of this very house. Inside, the museum keeps the entire wooden interior of an old pharmacy, with its jars and drawers, alongside instruments that make you very glad to live now. All around this house once spread a whole neighbourhood of crooked lanes and taverns, and almost nothing of it is left. Walk south, into the green slope of the park beside you, to find out where it went.