The Doctors’ Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis

by Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D. ’55, HS ’61, clinical professor of surgery (W.W. Norton & Co.) Before the discovery of bacteria and bacterial diseases and before Pasteur, Lister and Koch, the mid-19th century Viennese physician Ignac Semmelweis insisted that doctors should wash their hands before examining patients. Although his observations were largely ignored in his lifetime, Semmelweis is remembered for this now commonplace practice.