Semmelweis Museum of Medical History

The Semmelweis Museum occupies the actual house where Ignác Semmelweis was born in 1818, in the Tabán district just below Castle Hill — a fitting home for a museum dedicated to Hungary's most significant contribution to medical history. Semmelweis, working as an obstetrician in 1840s Vienna, discovered that maternal deaths from puerperal (childbed) fever dropped dramatically when doctors washed their hands with a chlorinated solution between conducting autopsies and delivering babies — a discovery that seems obvious today but was, at the time, met with hostility and ridicule by the medical establishment, since germ theory didn't yet exist to explain why it worked.

Semmelweis was professionally ostracised for the rest of his career, had a breakdown, and died in an asylum in 1865 — only for his handwashing theory to be vindicated a couple of decades later once Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch's germ theory of disease gave it a scientific basis. He's now honoured globally as "the saviour of mothers," and the term "Semmelweis reflex" entered common usage to describe reflexive rejection of new evidence that contradicts established norms.