100 Forint Ignác Semmelweis

Issued in 1968 to mark the 150th anniversary of Semmelweis's birth, this coin honors the physician whose discovery of antiseptic procedure in the 1840s was rewarded, during his lifetime, with institutional ridicule. His insistence that doctors wash their hands between the dissection room and the maternity ward at Vienna General Hospital cost him his position. He died in 1865 in a psychiatric institution, likely of the same septicemia he had spent decades trying to prevent.

The Hungarian State Mint struck this series in limited numbers for the collector market, part of a broader socialist-era program of gold commemoratives celebrating national scientific figures.