Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Ignac Semmelweis with an urgency and insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience. Ignac 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, they also threatened the medical establishment and so undid the passionate but self-destructive Semmelweis that he failed to overturn the status quo, leaving it to later medical giants - Pasteur, Lister and Koch - to establish conclusively the germ theory of disease.

About the Author

Sherwin B. Nuland is the author of eight previous books and is clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also teaches bioethics and medical history. As well as writing a regular column for The American Scholar, he has also written for the New Yorker, The New Republic, the New York Times, Time and New York Review of Books.

Reviews

The author of How We Die on the man whose simple notion that doctors spread disease by failing to wash their hands caused a revolution. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

"The Doctors' Plague succeeds: in telling the story of childbed fever, Nuland has managed to rediscover a critical moment in the history of medicine, the anxieties of which, although somewhat attenuated, persist today." The New York Times Book Review "The story of how doctors used to spread childbed fever from woman to woman in lying-in hospitals is chilling enough; the story of how they persisted in doing so in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt is blood-curdling; and the story of the flawed hero who tried to persuade them otherwise but was let down by his own character flaws is tragic. A great read." Matt Ridley, author of Genome and The Red Queen

In 1847, one out of every six women who delivered a baby in the First Division at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus hospital in Vienna died of childbed fever, a situation mirrored at other medical facilities in Europe and the U.S. Bestselling author Nuland (How We Die), a clinical professor of surgery at Yale, details in lively descriptive writing just how Ignac Semmelweis, an assistant physician at Allgemeine Krankenhaus, uncovered the origin of this devastating epidemic. Although theories were advanced that attributed it to unhealthy conditions in the expectant mother's body, Semmelweis launched his own investigation. He traced the high mortality rate from this fever in the First Division to the medical doctors, who went straight from dissecting cadavers to delivering babies without washing their hands; they were, in fact, infecting their own patients. Semmelweis's doctrine was controversial in medical circles, Nuland explains, partly because the eccentric physician's self-destructive personality alienated possible supporters. Drawing on careful research, the author convincingly argues that, contrary to popular myth, Semmelweis was not a persecuted victim but, despite his brilliance, was his own worst enemy. He was committed to a public mental institution and, according to Nuland, probably suffered from Alzheimer's and died from beatings administered by hospital personnel. In this engrossing story, Nuland shows how Semmelweis's groundbreaking discovery of how childbed fever was transmitted was later validated by the work of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister. (Oct.) FYI: This volume is the first in Norton's Great Discoveries series, which highlights scientific achievement. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.