The biography of a failed genius and also of a seminal idea. The genius is Ignac Semmelweis , the brooding , meticulous , 19th Century obstretrician who deduced solely through his observation of his patients how to stop fevers that made childbirth womankind’s single most common cause of deaths for centuries. With deaths of childbed fevers exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors were themselves spreading the disease . W hile his simple reforms worked immediately , they also threatened the medical establishment and so undid the the passionate but self destructive Semmelweis that he failed to overturn the status quo , leaving later to medical giants – Pasteur , Lister , and Koch , to establish conclusively the germ theory of the disease.
Authors: Sherwan B. Nuland .
Publishers: W.W Norton & Co
Date of Publication: 2003
No. of pages: 191