The Semmelweis story has often served as a metaphor to me as to how difficult it is for human beings to respond to any positive change that is needed and staring people in the face. Ideological blocks are just the start of the cognitive dissonance that blocks the solution from being implemented.
This article from the London Review of Books on British hospitals in the 19th Century is illuminative as well as information.
Oh, and for those who want a particularly amusing yet penetrating and profound musing on Semmelweis, Ben Hecht's great, and now essentially unknown tract against anti-Semitism, published in 1944, "A Guide for the Bedeviled," is well worth reading.
