Comparing those people to the anti-vaccine movement is disingenuous. These weren't rogue/fringe doctors ignoring mountains of evidence, they were the establishment and rejected Semmelweis' ideas because they felt he was unscientific. And importantly (and the title of this TIL doesn't do us any favors here), Semmelweis was wrong about what caused the deaths in the first place.

First of all, it wasn't a case of doctors refusing to wash their hands, they washed with water and soap. Semmelweis wanted them to wash with chlorinated lime. He thought that by touching dead bodies, particles of "cadaveric material" contaminated their hands and that patients absorbed those particles during gynecological examination, leading to every case of childbed fever.

That was the main point the established community rejected, that every case could have been caused by the same thing. The main reason they thought this unlikely was that they had seen the fever in different forms and in different situations.

The reason the chlorinated lime washing worked was because it killed off bacteria, which is something they didn't know about at the time. And we're talking not about bacteria you could get from cadavers, but bacteria that are on you at all times. Semmelweis thought you needed the disinfecting only after you were in contact with dead bodies, but you need to disinfect before every examination.

So: Semmelweis was wrong, but his work has helped to progress medicine to where it is today. His detractors were wrong as well (you could argue they more wrong) but their failure to recognize that the method worked, if not the theory behind it (it wasn't until Germ theory came about that they understood what might have been going on), has helped led to the way medicine is practiced today as well, and science as a whole.

Like I said, it's easy to criticize people when we have the benefit of having learned from their mistakes. And I use the word learned lightly here, because as much as you and I can argue about this on the internet, the idea that either of us fully understands these things is an illusion.

I think this illusion is related to what I objected to from the start: The idea that past people are inferior to us. Just look at the click-bait title of OP's post. It implies that doctors refused to wash their hands (not quite true) and that this not washing between autopsies and deliveries caused deaths (not quite true either). It almost seems a wonder that the human race has managed to survive up until today at all, if even the best and brightest from the past were bumbling buffoons who didn't even recognize you might want to wash your hands after touching a dead body. Good thing we're so much smarter today!