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IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS
1818 - 1865 IDC President Emeritus for Eternity
This stamp, issued by the Republic of Transkei, illustrates the disdain that the medical establishment in the 1840s had for Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis' discovery that washing your hands and instruments between conducting an autopsy and delivering a baby could essentially eliminate puerperal fever, the leading cause of death among postpartum women in the 19th century.
Now known now as the Father of Infection Control, Dr. Semmelweis' meticulously researched conclusion, backed up by a >90% drop in puerperal fever fatalities in the wards where he tested his theory that chlorinated lime killed "cadaverous particles" picked up during autopsies, was aggressively rejected by a medical community personally affronted by the suggestion that physicians could be a vector of disease.
The fact that it took more than 30 years of needless maternal death before hand and instrument washing were widely adopted is now enshrined as the "Semmelweis Effect," which posits that novel ideas, no matter how data-driven, will be resisted by professionals and institutions if those ideas run counter to established principle and practice.
JOHN SNOW
1813-1858 IDC Epidemiologist
This map plots the location of the 578 people who died over the course of 10 days during an 1854 cholera epidemic in Soho, London. By meticulously building his map and researching outlier cases, Dr. Snow--now known as the Father of Modern Epidemiology--took less than a week to identify a water pump on Broad Street as the likely vector.
Seventeen years after first encountering cholera in 1832, Dr. Snow published his theory that it was spread by contaminated water. But because of the prevailing belief that illness is the result of exposure to foul-smelling air (the "Miasma theory"), his conclusion was roundly rejected.
Then came 1854 and Dr. Snow's now famous foray into shoe leather epidemiology. His data-driven request to close the pump was Not Popular but when the epidemic did in fact end almost immediately after the pump handle was removed the event was used (SEVEN years later) to support Louis Pasteur's brand new "germ theory" of communicable disease.
Today, a replica pump stands on Broadwick (nee Broad) St. just outside the John Snow pub. A plate attached to its base notes that “... removal of the pump-handle has become an international symbol of public health.”
REBECCA CRUMPLER
1831-1895 IDC Physician
In 1864, at the time that Dr. Rebecca Lee (nee Davis) graduated as the first Black "Doctress of Medicine," from the New England Female Medical College, only 180 of the 54,543 physicians in the United States were Black (all men) and only 270 were women (all White).
As a doubly marginalized individual, Dr. Lee became subject to intense sexism and racism after moving her medical practice to post-Civil War Richmond Virginia, particularly by apothecaries who refused to fill prescriptions she wrote and doctors who ignored her and ridiculed her medical opinions.
Despite this, the medical care that Dr. Lee provided in a population of over 30,000 formerly enslaved peoples inspired other Black men and women to pursue training in health fields, enlarging access to medical care and public health for everyone.
In the late 1870s Dr. Crumpler and her second husband moved to Boston where, in 1883, she became the first Black woman in the United States to publish a medical textbook.
A Book of Medical Discourses features data-driven advice to physicians on treating illnesses in women, infants, and children.
IRENA "JOLANTA" SENDLER 1910-2008 IDC Social Worker
Born to a Catholic family in Warsaw, Poland Ms. Sendler (nee Krzyzanowska) was a public health official in the Poland Department of Social Welfare.
In 1940, when the Nazis forced 400,000 Jews into the hellish Warsaw Ghetto, Ms. Sendler invented concerns about a (fictitious) typhus epidemic in the Ghetto to gain daily entry as a public health official. She used these visits to smuggle food and medical supplies in and babies and toddlers out.
Under the war-time alias "Jolanta," Ms. Sendler helped to hide over 2,500 Jewish children in plain sight in Polish convents, orphanages, and foster families; burying records of the children's true identities in mason jars under the floorboards of her home in hopes of reuniting families after the war.
Later, after her husband's liberation from a German POW camp, Ms. Sendler continued to work in the Social Welfare Department, focusing on resettling in Israel those children who had lost their entire family to the gas chambers.
In 1965, Irena Sendler, who never stopped practicing her Catholic faith, was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem.
IDC Director/Goddess
