Download or read book The Tragedy of Childbed Fever written by Irvine Loudon and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2000 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Childbed Fever written by K. Codell Carter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1994-05-30 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Doctors Plague Germs Childbed Fever and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis Great Discoveries written by Sherwin B. Nuland and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-11-09 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A narrative of one of the key turning points in medical history.
Download or read book The Tragedy of Childbed Fever written by Irvine Loudon and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-01-06 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 a broad 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.
Download or read book Genius Belabored written by Theodore G. Obenchain and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Romantic Outlaws written by Charlotte Gordon and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SEATTLE TIMES This groundbreaking dual biography brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book—until now. In Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon reunites the trailblazing author who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Romantic visionary who gave the world Frankenstein—two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy. In 1797, less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft died, and a remarkable life spent pushing against the boundaries of society’s expectations for women came to an end. But another was just beginning. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary was to follow a similarly audacious path. Both women had passionate relationships with several men, bore children out of wedlock, and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history. The private lives of both Marys were nothing less than the stuff of great Romantic drama, providing fabulous material for Charlotte Gordon, an accomplished historian and a gifted storyteller. Taking readers on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England, she seamlessly interweaves the lives of her two protagonists in alternating chapters, creating a book that reads like a richly textured historical novel. Gordon also paints unforgettable portraits of the men in their lives, including the mercurial genius Percy Shelley, the unbridled libertine Lord Byron, and the brilliant radical William Godwin. “Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every rule there was to break,” Gordon writes of Wollstonecraft and Shelley. A truly revelatory biography, Romantic Outlaws reveals the defiant, creative lives of this daring mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid conventions of their era. Praise for Romantic Outlaws “[An] impassioned dual biography . . . Gordon, alternating between the two chapter by chapter, binds their lives into a fascinating whole. She shows, in vivid detail, how mother influenced daughter, and how the daughter’s struggles mirrored the mother’s.”—The Boston Globe
Download or read book Death in Childbirth written by Irvine Loudon and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an international study of maternal care and maternal mortality. Since about 1800, different countries have developed quite different systems of maternal care, and this book provides an analysis, grounded in statistics, of the evolution and the effectiveness of those systems in various countries.
Download or read book Medical Care and the General Practitioner 1750 1850 written by Irvine Loudon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is concerned not with famous doctors, but with the rank and file practitioners of the 18th and 19th centuries. Some common assumptions about the history of the medical profession are challenged in this book, based largely on manuscript sources.
Download or read book Kept from All Contagion written by Kari Nixon and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: "The germ theory again" : disease, ideology, and the possibilities of biotic life in the world of antibiotic purity -- Keep bleeding : plague, vaccination debates, and the necessity of leaky boundaries in Defoe's Journal of the plague year and Shelley's The last man -- "A speculative idea" : childbed fever, early germ theory debates, and (en)gendered speculation in Henry James's Washington Square -- Separation and suffocation : tuberculosis, etiological uncertainty, and female friendship in women's fiction -- Tainted love : venereal disease, morality, and the contagious disease acts in Ibsen's Ghosts and Hardy's The woodlanders and Jude the obscure -- Humanity's waste : typhoid fever, the failure of isolation, and the development of probiotics in three late-century works -- Conclusion: Shuffling within our mortal coil : concluding remarks.
Download or read book The Far Pavilions written by M. M. Kaye and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 961 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweeping epic set in 19th-century India begins in the foothills of the towering Himalayas and follows a young Indian-born orphan as he's raised in England and later returns to India where he falls in love with an Indian princess and struggles with cultural divides. The Far Pavilions is itself a Himalayan achievement, a book we hate to see come to an end. It is a passionate, triumphant story that excites us, fills us with joy, move us to tears, satisfies us deeply, and helps us remember just what it is we want most from a novel. M.M. Kaye's masterwork is a vast, rich and vibrant tapestry of love and war that ranks with the greatest panoramic sagas of modern fiction, moving the famed literary critic Edmond Fuller to write: "Were Miss Kaye to produce no other book, The Far Pavilions might stand as a lasting accomplishment in a single work comparable to Margaret Mitchell's achievement in Gone With the Wind."
Download or read book My Notorious Life written by Kate Manning and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Exquisitely written and richly detailed, My Notorious Life is a marvel. Kate Manning’s rags-to-riches Dickensian saga brings to vivid life the world of nineteenth-century New York City, in all its pitiful squalor and glittering opulence. I loved this novel.” —Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train A brilliant rendering of a scandalous historical figure, Kate Manning’s My Notorious Life is an ambitious, thrilling novel introducing Axie Muldoon, a fiery heroine for the ages. Axie’s story begins on the streets of 1860s New York. The impoverished child of Irish immigrants, she grows up to become one of the wealthiest and most controversial women of her day. In vivid prose, Axie recounts how she is forcibly separated from her mother and siblings, apprenticed to a doctor, and how she and her husband parlay the sale of a few bottles of “Lunar Tablets for Female Complaint” into a thriving midwifery business. Flouting convention and defying the law in the name of women’s reproductive rights, Axie rises from grim tenement rooms to the splendor of a mansion on Fifth Avenue, amassing wealth while learning over and over never to trust a man who says “trust me.” When her services attract outraged headlines, Axie finds herself on a collision course with a crusading official—Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. It will take all of Axie’s cunning and power to outwit him in the fight to preserve her freedom and everything she holds dear. Inspired by the true history of an infamous female physician who was once called “the Wickedest Woman in New York,” My Notorious Life is a mystery, a family saga, a love story, and an exquisitely detailed portrait of nineteenth-century America. Axie Muldoon’s inimitable voice brings the past alive, and her story haunts and enlightens the present.
Download or read book The Etiology Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever written by Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A History of Population Health written by Johan P. Mackenbach and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award In A History of Population Health Johan P. Mackenbach offers a broad-sweeping study of the spectacular changes in people’s health in Europe since the early 18th century. Most of the 40 specific diseases covered in this book show a fascinating pattern of ‘rise-and-fall’, with large differences in timing between countries. Using a unique collection of historical data and bringing together insights from demography, economics, sociology, political science, medicine, epidemiology and general history, it shows that these changes and variations did not occur spontaneously, but were mostly man-made. Throughout European history, changes in health and longevity were therefore closely related to economic, social, and political conditions, with public health and medical care both making important contributions to population health improvement. Readers who would like to have a closer look at the quantitative data used in the trend graphs included in the book can find these it here.
Download or read book Microbe Hunters written by Paul De Kruif and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1927.
Download or read book To Err Is Human written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine
Download or read book The Pigeon Pie Mystery written by Julia Stuart and published by Bond Street Books. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Indian Princess Alexandrina is left penniless by the sudden death of her father, the Maharaja of Brindor, Queen Victoria grants her a grace-and-favor home in Hampton Court Palace. Though it is rumored to be haunted, Alexandrina and her lady's maid, Pooki, have no choice but to take the Queen up on her offer. Aside from the ghost sightings, Hampton Court doesn't seem so bad. The princess is soon befriended by three eccentric widows who invite her to a picnic with all the palace's inhabitants, for which Pooki bakes a pigeon pie. But when General-Major Bagshot dies after eating said pie, and the Coroner finds traces of arsenic in his body, Pooki becomes the #1 suspect in a murder investigation. Princess Alexandrina isn't about to let her faithful servant hang. She begins an investigation of her own, and discovers that Hampton Court isn't such a safe place to live after all. With her trademark wit and charm, Julia Stuart introduces us to an outstanding cast of lovable oddballs from the palace Maze Keeper to the unconventional Lady Beatrice (who likes to dress up as a toucan--don't ask) as she guides us through the many delightful twists and turns in this fun and quirky murder mystery. Everyone is hiding a secret of the heart, and even Alexandrina may not realize when she's caught in a maze of love.
Download or read book Semmelweis written by Jens Bjørneboe and published by Sun and Moon Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated from the Norwegian and with an introduction by Joe Martin. Novelist and essayist Jens Bjorneboe turned to playwriting during the 1960's, as a genre in which he might "stage his literary assault on hierarchical society with an aggressive, extroverted form of theater" (from the Introduction). This play had its world premiere in Oslo in 1969, and recounts the tragic history of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the founder of modern antiseptic techniques, whose biography illustrates "the pitfalls and even horrors of the man or woman of science who is naively in search of truth and improvement in the human condition, in a society who is naively in search of truth and improvement in the human condition, in a society that reveres prestige and power and its own received belief systems to the exclusion of any new 'truths'" (from the Introduction). Brechtian in style and somewhat anarchic in its politics, "Semmelweis" provides a biting critique of obtuse authority.
