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Once handwashing protocols were implemented in the Austrian hospital, the rates of women dying from childbed fever plummeted.

Faced with a doctor-led maternity ward in which maternal deaths from the dreaded childbed fever were significantly higher than in the midwife-run clinic there, he racked his brain for clues as to why.

It lowered the cases of childbed fever to one tenth the original amount.

In a large class of cases, however, the connection between childbed fever and sepsis has been deduced rather from analogy than direct proof.

Then she remembered the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who discovered that deaths from childbed fever could be more or less eliminated by physicians simply washing their hands with chlorinated lime between patients.