Ignaz Semmelweis, the "Saviour of Mothers"

Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis was born on the 1st of July 1818 in Buda. The house in the Tabán neighbourhood where he came into the world was rented by his father, József, and accommodated both the family grocery store and the home where Ignác and his seven surviving siblings were raised. The well-to-do, German-speaking bourgeois family came to Hungary as the descendants of “Hienz” Germans from Burgenland. During the Reform Era, the Semmelweis family were among the Hungarian-Germans who supported the Hungarian independence movement. Six of the Semmelweis brothers were educated at the Catholic High School (of the University of Budapest). Among them Károly chose theology while Ignác decided to go to medical school. He graduated in 1844 in Vienna and he stayed there for his internship and residency, but moved back to Hungary to build his career here. In 1857 he married Mária Weidenhofer (1837–1910). Three of their children survived to adulthood, but only their youngest daughter, Antónia had children of her own. 

Ignác Semmelweis married Mária Weidenhofer (1837-1910), who came from a well-to-do German-speaking family from Pest, on 1 June 1857. At that time, Ignác Semmelweis had already been an appointed professor at the university of Pest, and in 1857 he was also invited to teach at the University of Zurich. However, he did not accept the position, a decision most probably influenced by his upcoming wedding. The marriage was blessed in the parish church of Our Lady of the Snows in Krisztinaváros, Budapest.

Following his studies in Pest and Vienna, Semmelweis worked as an Assistant Professor in the 1st Gynaecological Clinic in the imperial capital of Vienna until March 1849. It was here in May 1847 that he devised his thesis on the origin of childbed fever, discovering that it was not an infection that occurred and spread independently, but one caused by the degradation of organic materials, which was in fact passed on by medical personnel to the women in their care. In 1851 he became a senior physician in the department of obstetrics at Rókus hospital in Pest. Later, in 1855, he began teaching as a Professor of Obstetrics at the University of Pest and simultaneously led the Obstetrics Clinic at Újvilág Street where not a single woman died due to childbed fever in the period of 1860–1861.

„...the case of childbed fever goes on well, the council of hospitals in Paris, London, Dublin, Strassbourg, The Hague, Berlin, Göttingen, Prague, etc. Have been asked to research or refute the findings through experiments.”

Bacteriological research verified Semmelweis’s claims after his death, and even though his disciples carried on with his clinical research and there was no doubt about the recognition of his work, conscious efforts to recognise him as one of the medical greats only began in 1891. The closing of the Vienna cemetery where Semmelweis was buried provided the opportunity to transfer his remains to Hungary and inter them in an honorary grave, including him in the pantheon of Hungarian scientists and artists established in the Kerepesi Street cemetery.  In 1894, Albert Schickedanz (1846–1915) completed a marble sarcophagus meant to convey universal esteem, and its dedication ceremony was part of an international demographic convention.

The Memorial Committee only completed its tasks in 1906 when the sculpture of Semmelweis by Alajos Stróbl (1856–1926) erected in Erzsébet Square was unveiled in the presence of illustrious international scientists. This sculpture was later moved and re-erected in front of St. Rókus Hospital. According to the specifications of the Committee, Semmelweis was depicted wearing Hungarian national attire, but the simple clothing of the other figure in the sculpture, a mother expressing her gratitude, was meant to represent mothers all over the world.