There are some good history stories popping up in news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, and one that I just saw has to do with the birth of handwashing as a means of preventing the spread of disease.  The “father of hand washing” was the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who discoverd the problem with dirty hands when doctors would move from experimenting on cadavers to assisting pregnant mothers at delivery.

At the time,

Germs were yet to be discovered, and it was still believed in the 1840s that disease was spread by miasma – bad smells in the air – emanating from rotting corpses, sewage or vegetation. Victorians kept their windows firmly shut against such malevolent forces. So it didn’t seem a problem that trainee doctors at Vienna General would hang out in the morgue dissecting corpses to figure out what had rendered them dead and then pop up to the maternity ward to deliver a baby without washing their hands.

Keep It Clean: The Surprising 130-Year History of Handwashing

The improvement to patient survival after doctors started washing their hands led to the gradual adoption of hand washing among the general population.  Today, it’s needed more than ever.