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.