Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #703031 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-29
• Released on: 2004-11-07
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .40 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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. FYI: This volume is the first in Norton's Great Discoveries series, which highlights scientific achievement.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Nuland's second excellent book this year (after the superb memoir, Lost in America [BKL N 15 02]) focuses on a physician who, like Nuland in the midst of his career, suffered from severe psychological disease. Unlike Nuland, Ignac Semmelweis (1818-65) probably couldn't have recovered and, in any event, died under odd circumstances days after admission to a mental hospital. Nuland's thoughts about Semmelweis' illness and death are in the final chapter, and waiting for them is eminently worthwhile because of the riveting account of childbed, or puerperal, fever that comes first. Incidence of the bacterial disease attained massive proportions with the rise of the modern hospital and of giving birth there rather than at home, and enormous numbers of newborns as well as mothers perished. As the book's title suggests, dirty doctors (and medical students) spread the disease, for antisepsis and asepsis were unappreciated--indeed, unknown--until, after Semmelweis' death, Pasteur and Lister verified the existence and dangers of germs. A few physicians had figured out the how of puerperal fever before Semmelweis, but his fanaticism for cleanliness in practice at the general hospital in Vienna, the medical capital of Europe, demonstrated huge reductions in the disease. He failed to publish adequately, however, and establishment physicians, wedded to general theories of disease, pooh-poohed his practices, preventing their acceptance elsewhere. In the midst of the controversy, Semmelweis ran home to Pest, Hungary, a medical backwater, and into obscurity. This is one of the greatest stories in medical history, and perhaps no one has told it better than Nuland does. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"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