The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Great Discoveries) [Kindle Edition]
Author: Sherwin B. Nuland | Language: English | ISBN: B00C2LN0DE | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis
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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. Books with free ebook downloads available The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis
Download books file now The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Great Discoveries) [Kindle Edition] from with Mediafire Link Download Link
"Riveting" (Houston Chronicle), "captivating" (Discover), and "compulsively readable" (San Francisco Chronicle).
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. Books with free ebook downloads available The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis
- File Size: 586 KB
- Print Length: 203 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 039332625X
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (April 15, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00C2LN0DE
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #67,790 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #21 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Special Topics > History
- #62 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Medical
- #88 in Books > Medical Books > History
Many years ago, I read a story about Ignac Semmelweis that made him out to be a demigod. According to the legend, Semmelweis was a martyr to the cause of saving women from unnecessary deaths due to puerperal or childbed fever. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, childbed fever was ubiquitous and very often fatal in Europe and America.
In his fascinating new book, "The Doctors' Plague," Sherwin P. Nuland traces the history of this tragic disease and he sheds some light on how and why the medical profession was helpless to prevent it for so many years.
Nuland goes back to the great physician Hippocrates, who, over two thousand years ago, described childbed fever with great accuracy. For all of his powers of observation, Hippocrates knew nothing about the causes of the disease or how to prevent it. For many years, physicians promulgated wild theories, blaming the new mother's milk, bad air, suppression of discharges, and other equally irrelevant factors for the large number of infections that killed new mothers in hospitals. The figures tell the tragic story. At the London General Lying-In Hospital, between 1833 and 1842, 587 women per thousand died of childbed fever. The mortality statistics were similar in hospitals throughout Europe and the United States.
Ignac Semmelweis was born in Hungary. As a practicing doctor of obstetrics, he was appalled by the large number of women dying in childbirth. Because he was a keenly observant doctor who kept careful records and because he had a sharp, logical mind, Semmelweis eventually concluded that childbed fever was somehow passed to women from their doctors, nurses, and dirty bed linens.
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