SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt

Author:Steven D. Levitt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-01-24T07:00:00+00:00

Why on earth was the death rate in the doctors’ ward more than twice as high?

Semmelweis wondered if the women patients admitted to the doctors’ ward were sicker, weaker, or in some other way compromised.

No, that couldn’t be it. Patients were assigned to the wards in alternating twenty-four-hour cycles, depending on the day of the week they arrived. Given the nature of pregnancy, an expectant mother came to the hospital when it was time to have the baby, not on a day that was convenient. This assignment methodology wasn’t quite as rigorous as a randomized, controlled trial, but for Semmelweis’s purpose it did suggest that the divergent death rates weren’t the result of a difference in patient populations.

So perhaps one of the wild guesses listed above was correct: did the very presence of men in such a delicate feminine enterprise somehow kill the mothers?

Semmelweis concluded that this too was improbable. After examining the death rate for newborns in the two wards, he again found that the doctors’ ward was far more lethal than the midwives’: 7.6 percent versus 3.7 percent. Nor was there any difference in the death rate of male babies versus females. As Semmelweis noted, it was unlikely that newborns would “be offended by having been delivered in the presence of men.” So it was unreasonable to suspect that male presence was responsible for the mothers’ deaths.

There was also a theory that patients admitted to the doctors’ ward, having heard of its high death rate, were “so frightened that they contract the disease.” Semmelweis didn’t buy this explanation either: “We can assume that many soldiers engaged in murderous battle must also fear death. However, these soldiers do not contract childbed fever.”

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