That he named the things that were killed by lime "cadaveric particles" and not "bacteriae" at the time nobody knew that bacteriae exist can't be considered wrong.
How he named them was irrelevant. His explanation was good enough -- there WAS something on the hands of the doctors that was small enough and not visible that lime was able to destroy. Why was it hard to take it seriously then? Certainly not because others knew better -- nobody had "bacteria" in their language. He had to call that what was neutralized somehow.
You're rationalizing what Semmelweis said with a modern understanding of medicine. Of course, today, it's obvious that thoroughly clean hands help eradicate pathogens, and so it seems obvious that to note in 1840 that handwashing in chlorinated lime lowers death rates is to come immediately to the crux of the problem.
In fact, doctors in the 1840s were well aware of the concept of contaminants. They had already assumed a regime of handwashing. Moreover, Semmelweis himself was not content to lobby attendants to wash their hands. He was instead fixated on the idea of cadaverine particles, going so far as to invent new vectors for their creation in cases where no contact with dead bodies could have occurred. Semmelweis wasn't even correct about the mechanism of action in cleaning hands; he believed the chlorinated lime more thoroughly removed particles, when in fact the key was to kill the pathogens.
A simple way to sum the problem up: Semmelweis advocated handwashing... for staff who had been conducting autopsies. Semmelweis was on to something, but he himself seems to have missed it by a wide margin. Things could have been different if Semmelweis himself stuck with the evidence, rather than seizing the first bit of it that confirmed his theory and running away with it.
I hope you recognize that when you say "A simple way to sum the problem up: Semmelweis advocated handwashing... for staff who had been conducting autopsies" you also confirm that there were actually the doctors that did autopsies who didn't disinfect their hands. So he was obviously right. You can just claim that he set his goals too narrow, but even that much was not accepted by others.
Not at all. Semmelweis thought something associated with death was what was killing people (eg, he chose chlorinated limes which he found best removed the stink of death).
I suspect the focus on death and dead people meant people focused on that, and "proved" to themselves he was "wrong".
I can imagine scenarios where doctors dealt with one woman who had a good birth experience, didn't use the Semmelweis handwashing method (because the first woman didn't have the death particles) and then the next woman got infected and died. To many (unfortunately), that would prove his theory was wrong.
Citation needed, since you claim that doctors actually used the results of experiments to disprove him but at the same time didn't heed to the results of the experiments that showed that using lime was obviously beneficial.
No I didn't. I was very careful to make clear this was my opinion only ("I suspect" and "I can imagine scenarios").
As I noted, lime wasn't obviously beneficial, because Semmelweis claimed it removed the "cadaveric particles", and yet people were still dying when there should have been no "cadaveric particles" around (ie, no one had died).
It's like the story of how scurvy started happening again in the early 20th century with Scott in the Antarctic[1]. In the 18th century scurvy had been defeated by drinking (fresh) lime juice on long sea voyages, without a correct understanding of the mechanisms involved.
I think you've mistaken the point of my comment; you appear to think I'm sticking up for 1840s surgical hygiene. If you read my comment all the way through, you'll see that that's not at all my point.
How he named them was irrelevant. His explanation was good enough -- there WAS something on the hands of the doctors that was small enough and not visible that lime was able to destroy. Why was it hard to take it seriously then? Certainly not because others knew better -- nobody had "bacteria" in their language. He had to call that what was neutralized somehow.