their refusal to listen to midwives

That wasn’t the point:

Vienna hospital hat two maternity wards: One with medical students and one where midwives were educated. The maternity ward with the medical students had significantly higher death rates among mothers and babies than the one with the midwives.
After observing that an assistant died of sepsis after cutting himself with a scalpel while carrying out an autopsy, Semmeleweis supposed that the hands of the medical students, who switched between autopsy of corpses and the maternity ward were contaminated with “ptomaine” while the midwives weren’t as they didn’t perform autopsies. This “ptomaine” did not wash off by simply using water and soap, which the students used (if they washed their hands at all). Subsequently, he advised his students to wash their hand with chlorine after performing autopsies. As a result, the death rate in his maternity ward decreased significantly.