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It has become a ubiquitous mantra in the time of COVID-19: Wash your hands. Cheap and easy to do, it's one of the few pieces of advice that is essentially without controversy. And yet, hand ...

Based on: The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis, (Great Discoveries.) By Sherwin B. Nuland. 191 pp., illustrated. New ...

The cause was, invariably, “childbed” or “puerperal” (from the Latin for child and parent) fever, marked by raging fevers, putrid pus emanating from the birth canal, painful abscesses in ...

At that time, many women giving birth in the hospital wards were dying from what was known as childbed fever. As the newly appointed assistant to the first professor of obstetrics, Semmelweis took ...

“Young men and women! You are in mortal danger!” they read. “The peril of childbed fever menaces your life! Beware of doctors, for they will kill you! Remember! When you enter labor unless ...

Semmelweis, as Chief Resident in the maternity clinic at Vienna General Hospital, wanted to save as many women as he could from the deadly childbed fever. We know now that “childbed fever” was ...

Women in his maternity ward at the General Hospital in Vienna kept dying of a sweating, miserable illness called “childbed fever,” also known as puerperal fever. He wanted to know: Could some ...

While the first ward had a low rate of mortality, over 17% of patients on the second ward died of childbed fever after giving birth. Women were so afraid, many said they would rather give birth ...