On March 20, as millions of people around the world turned to the homepage of Google, they would have seen the cartoon of a bald-headed mustachioed man in a bow tie; the cheerful doodle belied the real-life tragedy of this Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis.

Born in 1818, Dr Semmelweis studied and practised obstetrics in the maternity clinic at Vienna General Hospital after graduating from medical school. The turning point in his life came when he was struck by the high death rate in a maternity ward that was staffed by physicians and medical students: 13 per cent to 18 per cent of new mothers were dying of childbed fever, also known as puerperal fever. This was in stark contrast to a ward that was run by midwives where only about 2 per cent of women died of the same condition.