Surgeon, scholar, best-selling author, Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Igná c Semmelweis with urgency and the insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience. Igná c 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.
