'Hand washing' was not practiced in the medical field until the middle of the 19th century
People are more frequent than ever, with the
Keep it clean: The surprising 130-year history of handwashing | World news | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/keep-it-clean-the-surprising-130-year-history-of-handwashing
Handwashing has been encouraged by the public with the spread of the new coronavirus infection, but it is surprising that in the 21st century, where various technologies and medical technologies are developing, it is still recommended to use `` handwashing '' There are not a few people. Nancy Tomes , a special professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook , commented, `` Experiencing such an event as a historian on a pandemic feels like a Titanic passenger. '' . Infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox account for most of the deaths, and he feels like he's back in the early 20th century, when the public was encouraged to wash his hands.
In Islam, Judaism and some other cultures, hand washing has been a religious ritual for many years. However, the idea that the disease spreads due to dirt and microorganisms attached to the hand did not appear until the late 19th century.
'If there is something you can call a' father of handwashing, 'it's Semmelweiss Ignats ,' said Millyam Wahrman , a professor of biology at William Patterson University .
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While working at the Vienna General Hospital, Ignats, born in Hungary , said, `` Despite being in the same Vienna General Hospital, the maternal illness mortality rate is different between the first and second obstetrics. '' He was faced with a problem. The first obstetrics, where the maternal mortality rate is high, is a clinic that also serves as a medical student's education. Then only a specialist obstetrician was working.
According to Daiichi Obstetrics, which also served as medical student education, `` I entered a morgue to dissect the body of a person who died of a disease, found the cause of death, and then helped to give birth to maternity work. Was performed on a daily basis. At that time, doctors had no habit of washing their hands, so in the first obstetrics, the infectious disease had spread to the obstetrics and women through the hands of the doctor who dissected the body, but people did not notice this point for a long time.
In the 1840s, when Ignatz worked at the General Hospital in Vienna, before bacteriology was established by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch , it was known that microorganisms and bacteria caused various diseases. Did not. Instead, it is believed that the disease is spread by poison from decayed corpses and sewage, and doctors seemed to take measures to 'close windows tightly' to prevent poison.
At one point, a doctor, a friend of Ignaz, injured his fingertip with a scalpel while dissecting the body. Afterwards, doctors died of the same illness as maternity deaths, but Ignatz knew of this process, saying, `` The body in the morgue contains 'particles' that cause the disease. Isn't 'particles' brought into the body of the maternity through the doctor's hand? '
To test this hypothesis, Ignaz has set a rule for first-year obstetricians to 'wash hands and instruments with
It was a remarkable achievement, but unfortunately, Ignaz's theory that 'the disease can be transmitted through the hands of doctors' has not been widely accepted and faces great opposition. Tomes pointed out that Ignats's theory was rejected because 'people didn't have the notion that they were 'walking petri '.' `` Doctors' hands are dirty and spreading disease to patients, '' said many of Vienna's doctors, who came from the middle and upper classes and believed that they were cleaner than the poor working class. The theory may have seemed insulting, says Tomes.
Depressed Ignaz was mentally depressed and died in a mental hospital sent in 1865. The word `` Semmelweiss reflection '', which refers to `` the tendency to reject new facts that do not fit the myth and the tendency to accept facts that can not be explained from common sense '', is understood by doctors who believed that Ignat's theory believed the conventional theory It comes from the fact that it was not done.
Forty years after Ignaz published the theory, the medical community has become more aware of bacteria, and a variety of disease-causing bacteria have been discovered. The concept of hygiene changed drastically and surgeons began to wash their hands in earnest, and British surgeon
Tomes noted that during the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, a large public health campaign to prevent transmission of tuberculosis was conducted. The tuberculosis campaign was aimed at both adults and children, 'teaching really small children the rules of washing and cleaning their hands,' said Tomes. When people came to know the fact that bacteria attached to the mouth, skin, hair and beard, they began to fear shaking hands and kissing. At the turn of the century, young people began to shave because of the psychology that feared bacterial adhesion. It was also during this time that food was packaged and sold individually.
However, as public health awareness has increased to some extent and infectious diseases themselves have been reduced, and antibiotics that are effective against infectious diseases have been developed, public awareness of public health crisis seems to have diminished. 'Excessive attention to this type of cleanliness has become less important. I think there has been a slack between the development of health care and the peaceful everyday life after World War II.' Tomes says:
Even though sexually transmitted diseases increased in the 1970s, there was a period of time when the idea of hygiene increased, but hand washing was not given much importance until the spread of the new coronavirus infection. A 2009 study found that 69% of women wash their hands after urination, only 43% of men wash their hands, 84% of women wash their hands after defecation, 78% of men wash their hands before eating Only 7% of women and 10% of men wash. '
Petra Klepac , Associate Professor of Infectious Disease Modeling at the London School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine , surveyed in 2018 how effective handwashing is against infectious disease epidemics. In particular, comparing the group that was not encouraged to wash their hands with the group that washed their hands 5 to 10 times more frequently than usual, they found that the risk of acquiring influenza was reduced by a factor of four.
Klepac points out that thorough hand-washing is almost the only effective measure when a new infectious disease, for which a cure or effective medicinal substance has not yet been identified, begins a pandemic. 'There is no drug intervention, no vaccines, which is why we consider non-pharmaceutical measures that can be easily implemented,' said Klepac. 'Washing your hands is easy, quick and inexpensive. Wash your hands with soap before touching your mouth, nose and eyes.'
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