On June 24, 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis published data showing that when doctors washed their hands before delivering babies, the mortality rate from childbed fever dropped from 18% to under 2%.

Medicine ignored him. He was ridiculed. He lost his position. He died in a mental institution in 1865.

The patients who died in the intervening years were almost entirely women.

The women who died in European maternity wards in the 1840s and 1850s, after Semmelweis had proved that handwashing prevented their deaths and before medicine accepted this, are rarely named. They are a statistical category.

Childbed fever — postpartum sepsis — was the leading cause of maternal death in hospitals for over a century. It was caused by doctors who moved directly from autopsies to deliveries without washing their hands, carrying bacteria that killed women at rates that no midwife-attended birth ever approached.

This is documented. It is one of the clearest examples in medical history of how institutional resistance to inconvenient evidence translates into dead patients — in this case, dead women.

Semmelweis was later vindicated. The women are still dead. Their names were not collected.