Sir

Fred Rosen's review of The War Within Us by Cedric Mims(Nature 408 769 2000 ) mentions Semmelweis, who introduced antisepsis into medical practice. Born in Budapest in 1818 to a family of German descent, he was called Ignaz Philipp in German and Ignác Fülöp in Hungarian. He considered himself Hungarian and attended medical school in Hungary, but pursued some of his profes-sional career in Vienna where he encountered both success in his work, and humiliation by his jealous boss.

Being male, however, he did not exactly die from "the very disease he spent his life trying to eradicate'" – since this was puerperism, or childbed fever. Rather, he died of staphylococcal infection, the agent that is most often responsible for post-partum death.