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摘要

The world's oldest continuously published scientific scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, celebrated its 350th year in print in 2015. One of the first published testaments to the importance of effective hand hygiene in a healthcare environment was over 150 years ago. Ignaz Semmelweis was working at the General Hospital of the University of Vienna in 1847. Semmelweis noticed a higher mortality rate in one of the obstetric clinics than observed for home delivery. He also discovered, comparing the two obstetric clinics at the hospital, a higher mortality rate at the one, at 16%, than at the other, at 7% (Semmelweis, 1861). On further investigation, he realised that doctors were coming from conducting autopsies in one room at the hospital, conducting a rudimentary handwash with soap and water, then delivering babies in the observed clinic. He noticed the putrid smell on the doctors' hands, even after washing with soap and water, and proposed that the doctors were infecting their patients in the clinic with particles carried over from the prior autopsy.