Physicians advocate washing your hands five times a day. My favorite medical hero is Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who performed his research at Vienna's maternity hospital and had the temerity to suggest that his colleagues could spread disease through failure to wash their hands. His theories were derided as laughable and insulting to the profession, and he died in a mental institution after being roundly discredited and succumbing to a downward spiral of disintegration.
This was the mid-nineteenth century and Dr.