GERMS HAVE ALWAYS BEFUDDLEDhumans. It’s not only their capacity to cause human suffering but their ability to set us against one another. Take poor Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor in a Viennese maternity ward of the 1840s. He noted that maternal death was much higher in women attended to by doctors than those looked after by midwives. The midwives, he noted, washed their hands whereas the surgeons shuttled ungloved and unwashed between maternity ward and morgue. His pilot experiment of getting the doctors to wash their hands with chlorinated water showed a startling drop in maternal mortality.
A fat lot of good this insight did Semmelweis: his vocal advocacy for hand hygiene banished him to
