"This is the story of a man whose ideas could have saved a lot of lives and spared countless numbers of women and newborns' feverish and agonizing deaths."

"You'll notice I said 'could have.'"

"The year was 1846, and our would-be hero was a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis."

"Semmelweis was a man of his time, according to Justin Lessler, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health."