Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818–1865)

Semmelweis is lauded today as the great lifesaving pioneer of antiseptic medicine -- but it was very different in his own day. His discovery of the cause of childbed (puerperal) fever, and that the rate of maternal death in the hospital could be drastically reduced by hand-washing, was considered heresy by the medical establishment, which refused to believe that doctors were contaminating the patients. In 1861, he published his principal work, Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers (The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever).