In 2020, it’s common wisdom that the best way to avoid catching a virus is to wash your hands thoroughly and frequently. But the correlation between hand washing and health wasn’t discovered until the mid-19th century by a German Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis. At the time, his ideas about hand washing were so controversial that he eventually ended up dying in a mental institution.
Semmelweis first made the correlation between hand washing and contracting diseases at an obstetric clinic in Vienna, where he served as an assistant in the 1840s. While most women at the time delivered their babies at home, those who did end up in the hospital died from infections at astounding rates — some estimate that 25-30% of women in hospitals died from puerperal infection, otherwise known as sepsis, after giving birth.
No one knew the reasons why, although there were many inferences — everything from poor ventilation to the onset of lactation was blamed for the deaths. (Could you imagine if women died because they were breastfeeding? Would Brooklyn mothers dare to?)
Semmelweis observed that mortality rates were higher in maternity wards where students, as opposed to midwives, were being trained. In particular, women were dying in the wards where students examined bodies of women who had died of puerperal infections, and then examined healthy patients. Semmelweis wondered if, in the process, the students were transferring the infection from dead bodies to healthy mothers. (Seems obvious now, but then, it was not.)
He began to order students to wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before each examination. When they began doing so, mortality rates in the wards where they operated dropped from 18.27 to 1.27 percent, and in March and August of 1848, no woman died after childbirth in Semmelweis’ division.
Sadly, it took until after his death in 1865 for Semmelweis’s ideas about hand washing to be adopted. Now, you can hardly walk two feet in a hospital without finding a dispenser of hand sanitizer, or a sign reminding you to wash your hands.
Likely, if you’re concerned at all about your health — or about the coronavirus pandemic — you regularly sanitize your digits. The CDC recommends that you wash your hands before, during and after preparing food; before eating food; after using the toilet or changing a diaper; after blowing your nose or sneezing; after touching garbage; and of course, after touching someone sick with a virus.
The hard part is washing your hands correctly. In order for a hand wash to be effective, the CDC recommends doing it for twenty seconds. Or, the amount of time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice. The Happy Birthday song can get old pretty quickly, so we made up the following rhyme that you can replace it with.
Washing your hands is good for your health
The doctors all say you should
Washing your hands is good for your health
It also feels pretty good
Or, you could try the song that Christina’s son learned in Pre-K:
Frontsie, backsie, in between
Wash them, scrub them, make them clean
Front-sies
Back-sies
In-between
1234 rinse off!
If you repeat THAT twice, you’ll be good to go.
Good luck out there! And come visit us for immunity boosting supplements. We have plenty. And we’re regularly hand washers here, we promise!