The Doctors' Plague
Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis

Will the real Dr Semmelweis please stand up? I first became aware of Dr Ignac Semmelweis through reading ‘The Cry and the Covenant’ back in the early 1970s. Microbiology, theories of germ transfer and other sciences of medicine became more familiar to me later, but I’d not critically revisited the ro......more

I dottori si lavano le mani. E questo perché, come ormai sanno anche i muli, il mondo è pieno di microscopici piccoli bastardi pronti a zomparci sul groppone e a piantare la bandiera della malattia nel nostro organismo. Non è sempre stato così ovvio, però. Poiché lavarsi le mani era troppo radical ch......more

Mint oly sok tragédia, ez is a legjobb szándékból született. A felvilágosodás lendülete szülte ugyanis az igényt, hogy az egészségügy vívmányait a szélesebb néptömegek is élvezhessék, ezért emelték az első kórházakat. Ugyanakkor ezzel mellékesen egyetlen épületbe tereltek mindenkit, aki orvosi segít......more

A doctor, reading about a doctor in a book written by a doctor, would seem to be doctorly, at the very least. But Dr. Semmelweis lived in the nineteenth century, Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland is a surgeon and an academic physician I have admired from afar, and this reviewer turned to a book published seven......more

Appreciated this exploration of the professional life and times of Ignac Semmelweis. It reassured me to learn that other physicians were in agreement with his thesis that childbed fever was spread from cadavers of infected women to new mothers and their infants. This was before the development of ge......more