WONDERBAARLIJKE DINGEN. (12)

THE BIBLE AND HYGIENE. (3)

“Wash your hands, doctor.” This is nothing new and applies to all of us. In every hospital and some other public buildings, there are hand sanitizers installed, where we can disinfect our hands. I remember seeing the doctor do that before he went into the delivery room to help my wife have her second baby. I can still picture him standing in front of a sink with a water pipe coming out of the wall, no tap on it, but a pedal on the floor on which he stepped, and the water began running. In other words, he not only washed his hands but also did this in “running water.” Now look at this, Moses wrote 3500 years ago, “And when he who has a discharge is cleansed of his discharge, then he shall count for himself seven days for his cleansing, wash his clothes, and bathe his body in running water; then he shall be clean.” Leviticus 15:13. He not only had to wash but also do that in “running” (fresh) water, AMAZING.
You may have heard of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, (1818-65), a Hungarian physician whose work demonstrated that hand-washing could drastically reduce the number of women dying after childbirth. This work took place in the 1840s, while he was Director of the maternity clinic at the Vienna General Hospital in Austria. Described as the” Saviour of mothers”, Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as “child-bed fever”) could be drastically cut using hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics. Puerperal fever was common in mid-19th-century hospitals and often fatal. Of course, now we know why it is so important to wash one’s hands. All of us have probably seen on TV how doctors wash their hands before going into the operation room. In the Bible book Leviticus, the words wash, washed and washing occur 44 times. Interesting. Karl Sudhoff, professor of medical history, writes about his deep appreciation for the practical laws in the Bible: “Chapters 13 and 14 of Leviticus are weighty official documents that deserve to be written in letters of gold, as they form the germ of the modern prophylaxis (protection) against contagious diseases.” (K. Sudhoff, Essays in the History of Medicine, Medical Life Press, New York, 1926, page 146.) Who says, the Bible is an old-fashioned book, it is very up to date and reveals things that we have only discovered the last couple of hundred years. ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. Praise God.