The Doctors' Plague

Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis

3 December 2004

Description

The "riveting" (Houston Chronicle), "captivating" (Discover), and "compulsively readable" (San Francisco Chronicle) story of the discovery that handwashing helps prevent the spread of disease.

Surgeon, scholar, best-selling author, Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Ignác Semmelweis with urgency and the insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience. Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately—childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared—they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end.

Reviews

"Nuland has managed to rediscover a critical moment in the history of medicine, the anxieties of which…persist today." — New York Times Book Review

Paperback

9780393326253

140 x 203 mm • 208 pages

£12.99

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Ebook

9780393347852

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