richie-omondi/r-handwashing-analysis

In 1847, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis made a breakthough discovery: he discovers handwashing. Contaminated hands was a major cause of childbed fever and by enforcing handwashing at his hospital he saved hundreds of lives.

R-Handwashing-Analysis

In 1847, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis made a breakthough discovery: he discovers handwashing. Contaminated hands was a major cause of childbed fever and by enforcing handwashing at his hospital he saved hundreds of lives. The tragedy is that, despite the evidence, Semmelweis' theory — that childbed fever was caused by some "substance" (what we today know as bacteria) from autopsy room corpses — was ridiculed by contemporary scientists. The medical community largely rejected his discovery and in 1849 he was forced to leave the Vienna General Hospital for good.

One reason for this was that statistics and statistical arguments were uncommon in medical science in the 1800s. Semmelweis only published his data as long tables of raw data, but he didn't show any graphs nor confidence intervals. If he would have had access to the analysis put together in this notebook using R, he might have been more successful in getting the Viennese doctors to wash their hands.

Dataset:https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1xz9_O_bBcyLNzU871uYqpKHV8wwTKpAB