The Doctors' Plague
Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis
2003
First Published
3.82
Average Rating
191
Number of Pages
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.
Avg Rating
3.82
Number of Ratings
809
5 STARS
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4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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1 STARS
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Author
Sherwin B. Nuland
Author · 14 books
Sherwin Nuland was an American surgeon and author who taught bioethics and medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine. He was the author of The New York Times bestseller and National Book Award winning How We Die, and has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, Time, and the New York Review of Books. His NYTimes obit: http://nyti.ms/1kxNtQC
