Vienna’s General Hospital in the 1840s had two maternity clinics. One trained doctors, the other midwives, and in the doctors’ clinic women died of childbed fever at more than twice the rate. Ignaz Semmelweis described women on their knees, begging not to be admitted to it. He was also puzzled by the ones who gave birth in the street on the way in, because so few of them caught the fever. In 1847 he worked out that the students were coming to the ward from the dissecting room, and made them wash in chlorinated lime, and deaths fell from about ten in a hundred to about two. He had the tables. The women on their knees had only what people said about that ward, and they got there first.