My great-grandmother Aganetha Klassen #6465
(1848-1890) never met Ignaz Semmelweis. He was a Hungarian physician who was
born in 1818 and died in 1865. He graduated from the University of Vienna in
1844 and was appointed as a doctor of obstetrics at the Vienna General Hospital
in 1846. He was responsible for two maternity clinics that provided free care
for poor women, and he noticed that they had vastly different death rates for delivering
mothers. It was so bad that poor women preferred to give birth on the street
rather than at the one clinic! He was disturbed by this and started to analyze
the problem.
Ignaz Semmelweis (Wikipedia)
He eliminated every possible difference between the two clinics, except that the bad one trained medical students and the good one trained midwives. He then realized that the bad clinic had a morgue attached to it and that the medical students conducted autopsies in the morgue. No one understand the germ theory of infection, so he thought that the “cadaverous” smell on the students’ hands was responsible for transmitting the infection to the pregnant mothers. So in 1847 he ordered the students to wash their hands with chlorinated lime before delivering a baby. Voila, the death rate from postpartum infection dropped by 90%!
Vienna General Hospital
But Semmelweis’ discovery contradicted the “four
humours” theory of disease that was prevalent at the time. He couldn’t come up
with a convincing theory of why the handwashing worked. He didn’t know that not
only did the chlorinated lime remove the smell of the cadavers, but also it was
an antiseptic that killed bacteria. He was outraged that Austrian medical
community seemed so callous about the lives of the mothers and started writing
increasingly angry letters to leading doctors and scientists. In 1849, he lost
his job in the Vienna General Hospital. He was exiled to a small provincial
hospital where he again virtually eliminated postpartum infection with
handwashing. His public letters to leading scientists became increasingly
unhinged, so he was placed in an insane asylum in 1865. When he tried to
escape, the guards beat him; and he died of gangrene from the wounds. Such a
sad ending for man who had saved thousands of mothers from death.
It was not until the 1880s that Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of infection and provided a theoretical basis for Semmelweis’ empirical observations. Pasteur was highly respected, so it was only then that the practice of doctors and midwives using an antiseptic wash started to be introduced. Today in the developed world, the incidence of postpartum infection is almost zero.
How does Ignaz Semmelweis relate to Aganetha Klassen? On 11 February 1890, she gave birth to her tenth child, a son named Johann Siemens, at Rosenhoff, Manitoba. But she became ill and died seven days later on 18 February. Her obituary records that she died “after a serious, six-day illness after childbirth (nach sechstägiger schwerer Krankheit im Wochenbett),” which was almost certainly postpartum infection. The doctor or midwife who delivered the baby surely had no idea how to prevent the infection. But if the medical community had believed Ignaz Semmelweis when he discovered in 1847 that an antiseptic handwash nearly eliminated the infection, her life (and those of many other mothers) might have been saved. Thankfully, Aganetha Klassen was the last of my ancestors to die of postpartum infection, but it had been the scourge of mothers for millennia.
Source: Obituary, Correspondent,
“Aus Mennonitischen Kreisen,” Mennonitische
Rundschau Elkart, Indiana 5 March 1890: 1. Original held at
Mennonite Heritage Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba.
The young Aganetha Klassen, who died at age 41, left behind a grieving husband Gerhard T. Siemens #6463 (1834-1908) and seven young children ranging in age from little Johann to 12-year-old David. Aganetha was the third wife whom Gerhard had buried. Son Johann died six months later in August, so it was a double tragedy for the family. Very often the infant died soon after the mother because he needed his mother’s milk to provide him nutrition and immunity. As was often the case, husband Gerhard quickly remarried in July to the widow Maria (Peters) Rempel #7038.
When doing research, be alert to a mother who dies a week or two after giving birth – even if the cause is not stated, it is usually postpartum infection. It tells us how the joyous birth of a child could so quickly turn to grief, often a double grief. And we should be thankful to God that he has allowed to live in a time when doctors can prevent this terrible death so easily.
