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

SHERWIN B. NULAND

Today, even young children know to wash their hands before they eat or after they go to the bathroom. In mid-19th-century Vienna, however, the idea of washing one's hands to stop the spread of disease was subversive. At that time, one of every six mothers in Europe died of abdominal infection within a few days of giving birth. Doctors had many suspicions about the cause of the disease they called childbed fever. Perhaps the pressure of the uterus on the intestines caused stasis of fecal material that was then absorbed into the veins. It never occurred to anyone that doctors spread the disease by working on cadavers and then, without a stop at the washbasin, delivering babies. A Hungarian physician named Ignac Semmelweis began to suspect that link and insisted that physicians wash their hands in a chemical solution before seeing each patient. Though Semmelweis might have become renowned as the founder of germ theory, he himself undermined any such recognition. In the same engaging style he employed in HOW We Die, Nuland evokes the medical and political climate of the time to tell Semmelweis' story and give him the credit Nuland argues that this forgotten physician deserves. Norton, 2003, 191 p., hardcover, $21.95.