Budapest Guide
Gellért-hegy and the Tabán
The Semmelweis Medical Museum
Opening time: Tues– Sun: mid-March to Oct 10.30am–6pm, Nov to mid-March 10.30am–4pm
Price: 700Ft
Address: Apród utca 1–3
Website: www.semmelweis.museum.hu
Often overlooked by tourists, the Semmelweis Medical Museum (Semmelweis Orvostörténeti Múzeum) contains a fascinating collection of artefacts relating to the history of medicine, with mummified limbs from ancient Egypt, and a shrunken head used by Borneo witchdoctors giving an international dimension to the display. Other exhibits – including a medieval chastity belt, trepanning drills, a lifesize wax model of a dissected female cadaver, and a sewing machine with what looks like a bicycle chain attached, for closing stomach incisions – all give an idea of the centuries of misconceptions and the slow progress of medicine through fatal errors.
Dr Ignác Semmelweis (1818–65), who lived in this house until he was 5, discovered the cause of puerperal fever – a form of blood poisoning contracted in childbirth, which was usually fatal. While serving in Vienna's public hospitals in the 1840s, he noticed that deaths were ten times lower on the wards where only midwives worked than on the ones attended by doctors and students, who went from dissecting corpses to delivering babies with only a perfunctory wash. His solution was to sterilize hands, clothes and instruments between operations – an idea dismissed as preposterous by the hospital, which fired him. Embittered, he wrote open letters to obstetricians, accusing them of being murderers, and was sent to an asylum where he died within a couple of weeks. Only after Pasteur's germ theory was accepted was Semmelweis hailed as the "saviour of mothers". The good doctor is buried in the garden.
The museum also contains the 1876 Holy Ghost Pharmacy, transplanted here from Király utca, and a collection of portraits, including one of Vilma Hugonai, Hungary's first woman doctor, and one of Kossuth's sister, Zsuzsanna, who founded the army medical corps during the War of Independence.