Handwashing

Handwashing is a big deal. When I was in nursing school twenty-five or so years ago, we were taught how to wash our hands properly, but it is oh so much more than that now. We are still inserviced about it yearly, have the potential to receive an award if we demonstrate good handwashing, and constantly use pumps on the wall that conveniently administer a puff or glob of an alcohol based rub. Outside of the medical world bottles of hand sanitizers are in every woman’s purse, and canisters with hand wipes are offered when we enter a grocery store. I wonder if it is too much sometimes, and then I remember Dr. Semmelweis, a young Hungarian physician who was the first to link handwashing and disease. It seems that the practice during the mid 1800s when he was delivering babies was for the doctors to go from cadavers to one laboring mother to the next without washing their hands, and the women were dying at an alarming rate. There is an interesting story, maybe legend, about all this, but the sad part is his discovery was so ridiculed by his peers that he eventually went “mad” and was hospitalized in an asylum where he later died. It seems absurd that this was a new idea at one time. If Dr. Semmelweis could see how obsessed we are with clean hands now!