Name: The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Great Discoveries)
ISBN: 9780393326253

Sherwin B. Nuland

Analyzes how doctor Ignac Semmelweis's reforms of the medical field led to his discovery of the correlation between hand washing and reduced infection, recounting how his work contributed to the establishment of germ theory.

The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Great Discoveries)

Shay

I read this book as a requirement for my Microbiology class at Uni and it was fantastic - if a little dense at times. 

The book starts off with a very engaging story about a woman giving birth. It's a fictional story meant to hook the reader by bringing an emotional element into what it might have been like at that time to be a young pregnant woman who is afraid of giving birth because of the death rates. 

Nuland then goes into a concise history and biography of Ignác Semmelweis and the beginning of antiseptic. The only complaint is that after the first chapter he jumps immediately into very technical and dense writing and it lost me for a minute. It was not a seamless transition. But I do think Nuland did the topic justice. 

TW's: Graphic descriptions of death and body horror, pregnancy, medical procedures, and disease.

The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Great Discoveries)

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