The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Great Discoveries) (Paperback)

The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Great Discoveries) By Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D. Cover Image
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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.



About the Author


Sherwin B. Nuland (1930—2014) was the National Book Award-winning author of How We Die and clinical professor of surgery at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Praise For…


Nuland has managed to rediscover a critical moment in the history of medicine, the anxieties of which…persist today.
— New York Times Book Review
Product Details
ISBN: 9780393326253
ISBN-10: 039332625X
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: November 17th, 2004
Pages: 208
Language: English
Series: Great Discoveries