THE PLAGUE DOCTOR REVIEW SERIES

Nuland provides enough medical history to show how SemmelweisвЂ™s 1847 accomplishment reflected the revolutionary teachings in scientific logic then being introduced by the hospitalвЂ™s chief of surgical pathology and how these were opposed by the old guard. To prevent the disease, he insisted that every medical attendant wash in a chloride solution before examining a woman in labor. A trained observer, Semmelweis analyzed obstetric procedures and claimed that childbed fever was caused by the transfer of invisible вЂњputrid cadaver particlesвЂќ from the hands of students and attending physicians. Enter Ignac Semmelweis, an outsider from Hungary with a poor accent who had turned to obstetrics after failing to win appointment to his first- and second-choice positions at the hospital.

He then turns to the cause of her death, childbed fever, vividly showing its horrific effects on the body and detailing several erroneous, now laughable theories doctors had come up with to explain its origin. Nuland (Surgery/Yale School of Medicine) opens with the dramatic account of a young womanвЂ™s death after delivering her first child at a hospital in mid-19th-century Vienna. The author has turned his considerable narrative talents to a signal moment in the history of medicine.

THE PLAGUE DOCTOR REVIEW SERIES

In the first of NortonвЂ™s New Discoveries series on scientific breakthroughs, NBA-winner Nuland ( How We Die, 1994, etc.) puts into proper historical context the achievements of a pioneering obstetrician.

The plague doctor review