The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780393326253)

Surgeon, scholar, best-selling author, Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Ign c Semmelweis with urgency and the insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience. Ign c 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.