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In the 1840’s Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis noticed a pattern. He noticed that too many new mothers were dying of a fever. And it didn’t seem like a coincidence to him that many of these women who were dying shortly after childbirth had something in common. The doctors who delivered their babies had just performed autopsies. The death rate – by this fever – of new mothers, whose babies were delivered by doctors who had just handled dead bodies, was sometimes over thirty percent! That’s incredibly high, even by the standards of the 1840’s. The death rate of this clinic, where doctors performed autopsies and delivered babies, was so high that some women gave birth on the street, rather than go to this clinic. So Dr. Semmelweis performed an experiment. He tried one simple thing. This one simple thing dropped the death rate from this fever from the double digits to the single digits. Some months the death rate was zero! The one simple thing Dr. Semmelweis did: After doctors were done performing autopsies, before they deli