num_pages: 208
description: 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.
language: English
title: The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis
titlecomplete: The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis
genres: History Of Medicine, Medical, History, European History, Biography, Science, Medicine, History Of Science, Health, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 732
series: Great Discoveries
publisher: W. W. Norton  Company