The Tragedy Of Childbed Fever

Author : Irvine Loudon
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN 13 : 9780198204992
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.9X/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : K. Codell Carter
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0313388385
Total Pages : 142 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Sherwin B. Nuland
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 039332625X
Total Pages : 203 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Theodore G. Obenchain
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817319298
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Irvine Loudon
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191542288
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Charlotte Gordon
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0812980476
Total Pages : 674 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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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

Author : Irvine Loudon
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780198227939
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307830381
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Gathering of Old Men written by Ernest J. Gaines and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man--set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s. The Village Voice called A Gathering of Old Men “the best-written novel on Southern race relations in over a decade.”

Author : Johan P. Mackenbach
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004429131
Total Pages : 442 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Irvine Loudon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 656 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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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.