Semmelweis, His Life and His Doctrine

Semmelweis, His Life and His Doctrine PDF Author: Sir William Japp Sinclair
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Semmelweis, His Life and His Doctrine

Semmelweis, His Life and His Doctrine PDF Author: Sir William Japp Sinclair
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description


The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever

The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever PDF Author: Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299093648
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Semmelweis's exposure to the childbed fever was concurrent with his appointment to the Vienna maternity hospital in 1846. Like many similar hospitals and clinics in the major cities of nineteenth-century Europe and America, where death rates from the illness sometimes climbed as high as 40 percent of admitted patients, the Viennese wards were ravaged by the fever. Intensely troubled by the tragic and baffling loss of so many young mothers, Semmelweis sought answers. The Etiology was testimony to his success. Based on overwhelming personal evidence, it constituted a classic description of a disease, its causes, and its prevention. It also allowed a necessary response to the obstetrician's already vocal, rabid, and perhaps predictable critics. For Semmelweis's central thesis was a startling one - the fever, he correctly surmised, was caused not by epidemic or endemic influences but by unsterilized and thus often contaminated hands of the attending physicians themselves.

Genius Belabored

Genius Belabored PDF Author: Theodore G. Obenchain
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817319298
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The fascinating story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a nineteenth-century obstetrician ostracized for his strident advocacy of disinfection as a way to prevent childbed fever In Genius Belabored: Childbed Fever and the Tragic Life of Ignaz Semmelweis, Theodore G. Obenchain traces the life story of a nineteenth-century Hungarian obstetrician who was shunned and marginalized by the medical establishment for advancing a far-sighted but unorthodox solution to the appalling mortality rates that plagued new mothers of the day. In engrossing detail, Obenchain recreates for readers the sights, smells, and activities within a hospital of that day. In an era before the acceptance of modern germ science, physicians saw little need for cleanliness or hygiene. As a consequence, antiseptic measures were lax and rudimentary. Especially vulnerable to contamination were new mothers, who frequently contracted and died from childbed fever (puerperal fever). Genius Belabored follows Semmelweis’s awakening to the insight that many of these deaths could be avoided with basic antiseptic measures like hand washing. The medical establishment, intellectually unprepared for Semmelweis’s prescient hypothesis, rejected it for a number of reasons. It was unorthodox and went against the lingering Christian tradition that the dangers of childbirth were inherent to the lives of women. Complicating matters, colleagues did not consider Semmelweis an easy physician to work with. His peers described him as strange and eccentric. Obenchain offers an empathetic and insightful argument that Semmelweis suffered from bipolar disorder and illuminates how his colleagues, however dedicated to empirical science they might have been, misjudged Semmelweis’s methods based upon ignorance and their emotional discomfort with him. In Genius Belabored, Obenchain identifies Semmelweis’s rightful place in the pantheon of scientists and physicians whose discoveries have saved the lives of millions. Obenchain’s biography of Semmelweis offers unique insights into the practice of medicine and the mindsets of physicians working in the premodern era. This fascinating study offers much of interest to general readers as well as those interested in germ theory, the history of medicine and obstetrics, or anyone wishing to better understand the trajectory of modern medicine.

Childbed Fever

Childbed Fever PDF Author: K. Codell Carter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313388385
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
In the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of women died each year from childbed fever. The Carters describe birthing conditions and medical practices in Vienna during the time when young Semmelweis began to work in a maternity clinic there. He discovered that childbed fever arose because medical personnel did not wash adequately after dissecting corpses before doing vaginal examinations of women in labor. After he required students to disinfect themselves, the mortality rate immediately dropped. However, Semmelweis's views were not accepted by the senior physicians who believed the disease was due to a variety of causes. After strident attempts to persuade skeptics, Semmelweis was committed to a Viennese insane asylum where he died at age 42, possibly from beatings by asylum guards. Childbed fever, now called puerperal infection, continues to be a leading cause of maternal mortality, in spite of the best efforts of modern physicians.

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

The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Great Discoveries) PDF Author: Sherwin B. Nuland
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039332625X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
A narrative of one of the key turning points in medical history.

The Tragedy of Childbed Fever

The Tragedy of Childbed Fever PDF Author: Irvine Loudon
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780198204992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Childbed fever was by the far the most common cause of deaths associated with childbirth up to the Second World War throughout Britain and Europe. Otherwise known as puerperal fever, it was an infection which followed childbirth and caused thousands of miserable and agonising deaths every year. This book provides the first comprehensive account of this tragic disease from its recognition in the eighteenth century up to the second half of the twentieth century. Examining this within abroad history of infective diseases, the author goes on to explore ideas from past debates about the nature of infectious diseases and contagion, the discovery of bacteria and antisepsis, and charts the complicated path which led to the discovery of antibiotics. The large majority of deaths from puerperal fever were due to one micro-organism known as Streptococcus pyogenes, and the last chapter presents valuable new ideas on the nature and epidemiology of streptococcal disease up to the present day.

MEA CULPA & The Life and Work of Semmelweis

MEA CULPA & The Life and Work of Semmelweis PDF Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Coming just after his masterpieces Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, Mea Culpa is Céline's scathing denunciation of Soviet communism, written after a personal visit to that "worker's paradise" in the 1930s. In his inimitable, blistering style, Céline strips bare not only the communist experiment but also all other modern systems, showing them for what they are: illusions destined to fail because they are based on false ideas about the nature of Man. At a time when many other writers and intellectuals were fawning over the Soviet Union and the ideas of Marx and Lenin, Céline was quick to see them for what they really were, and Mea Culpa now stands as a prescient and accurate statement about the true nature of communism in the modern world. Also included in this volume is The Life and Work of Semmelweis, Céline's first book. This meditation on the heroic and tragic physician who pioneered antisepsis in medicine gives us a key to understanding Céline's vision of life and all of his subsequent work. Written in a more conventional style than his later books, Céline's genius for trenchant observation is nonetheless fully apparent.

The Butchering Art

The Butchering Art PDF Author: Lindsey Fitzharris
Publisher: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715483
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Winner, 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly A Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian "Warning: She spares no detail!" —Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the squeamish—and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course of history. Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister’s career path to his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to Lister’s contemporaries—some of them brilliant, some outright criminal—and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers. Eerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world.

The Misinformation Age

The Misinformation Age PDF Author: Cailin O'Connor
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300241003
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
“Empowering and thoroughly researched, this book offers useful contemporary analysis and possible solutions to one of the greatest threats to democracy.” —Kirkus Reviews Editors’ choice, The New York Times Book Review Recommended reading, Scientific American Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false beliefs. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? The Misinformation Age, written for a political era riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, shows convincingly that what you believe depends on who you know. If social forces explain the persistence of false belief, we must understand how those forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively. “[The authors] deftly apply sociological models to examine how misinformation spreads among people and how scientific results get misrepresented in the public sphere.” —Andrea Gawrylewski, Scientific American “A notable new volume . . . The Misinformation Age explains systematically how facts are determined and changed—whether it is concerning the effects of vaccination on children or the Russian attack on the integrity of the electoral process.” —Roger I. Abrams, New York Journal of Books

Doctors

Doctors PDF Author: Sherwin B. Nuland
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307807894
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 547

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Book Description
From the author of How We Die, the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine, told through the lives of the physician-scientists who paved the way. How does medical science advance? Popular historians would have us believe that a few heroic individuals, possessing superhuman talents, lead an unselfish quest to better the human condition. But as renowned Yale surgeon and medical historian Sherwin B. Nuland shows in this brilliant collection of linked life portraits, the theory bears little resemblance to the truth. Through the centuries, the men and women who have shaped the world of medicine have been not only very human, but also very much the products of their own times and places. Presenting compelling studies of great medical innovators and pioneers, Doctors gives us a fascinating history of modern medicine. Ranging from the legendary Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, to Andreas Vesalius, whose Renaissance masterwork on anatomy offered invaluable new insight into the human body, to Helen Taussig, founder of pediatric cardiology and co-inventor of the original "blue baby" operation, here is a volume filled with the spirit of ideas and the thrill of discovery.