Dirty Hands & Green Tongues
How a Hungarian Physician Saved Women from Childbed Fever and Became the ‘Savior of Mothers’
Guest: Anthony Valerio, editor and teacher, author of “Semmelweis”
Wash your hands isn’t just the best way to prevent COVID-19 in 2020–it was also the rallying cry of Ignaz Semmelweis, a young Hungarian doctor trying to end the scourge of childbed fever and lower maternal mortality rates in the 1840s, well before germ theory entered scientific thought.
When the Cure is the Cause
Guest: Jeanne Lenzer; medical investigative journalist; author of "The Danger Within Us: America's Untested, Unregulated Medical Device Industry and One Man's Battle to Survive It"
When people in the ‘60s started developing hairy green tongues, blindness, and paralysis, doctors thought it was a strange new infectious disease. They turned to a specific drug, clioquinol, in hopes of a cure, but what they found was shocking. The so-called remedy was causing the disease.