His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, and they threw him in a mental institution. He was trying to get doctors to wash their hands in between handling corpses and doing surgery, and they got super offended about it.
Edit: I AM LYING! Partly. Semmelweis discovered illnesses caused by bacteria, but he didn’t understand that they were caused by microbes, or the mechanism at work. He just was able to piece enough of it together to test empirically that if the doctors washed their hands, then people didn’t get sick in the same way that they did if the hands had corpse-goo on them. Linking him to specifically understanding that tiny little creatures were everywhere was a little bit misleading thing for me to do.
Also, they were usually delivering babies, not doing “surgery” in the modern sense of opening people up and poking around in them.
The rest of what I said is true.
“A gentleman’s hands could never be dirty!”
He made them scrub with bleach water until he couldn’t smell corpse smell anymore.
Semmelweiss. His radical idea of “surgeons ought to wash their hands” saw him widely ridiculed and reduced to poverty, and he died in an institution.
Semmelweis discovered that a particular type of infection was much less likely to occur when doctors washed their hands with chlorinated lime water between doing an autopsy and examining a patient. However he did not know why or how this worked, and did not discover microorganisms (which were already observed by Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek some ~180 years earlier).
What I love is that when Van Leeuwenhoek first saw microorganisms in his microscope he named them “animalcules”, as in animal + molecule. Isn’t that freakin cute?
And if you believe that, then you’ll believe anything… that is supported by hard evidence and deducted from those by sound logical principles.
Shout out to Louis Pasteur.
Wierd part is you can actually see it with a microscope. Anime Parallel world pharmacy made more sense then real life.