Nina's Clinic

The year is 1847. You are Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a young Hungarian physician working in the maternity ward of Vienna General Hospital — the largest hospital in Europe. You have a troubling puzzle. Your hospital has two maternity wards. Ward One is staffed by doctors and medical students. Ward Two is staffed by midwives. Both wards are in the same building, with similar patients and the same procedures. But the numbers tell a strange story. In Ward One, about 18 out of every 100 new mothers develop a dangerous fever after giving birth and don't survive. In Ward Two, only about 2 out of 100 do. Ward One loses nine times more patients than Ward Two. The fever is called "childbed fever" (puerperal fever) — an infection that can develop after childbirth. Nobody knows what causes it. Most doctors blame "miasma," meaning bad air. But if bad air were the cause, both wards should be affected equally — they share the same building. Something else is going on. You are determined to figure out what.