Scan barcode
A review by svjak
The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis by Sherwin B. Nuland
4.0
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.
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Medical content, Pregnancy, Death, Medical trauma, and Terminal illness