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ISBN-10: 0299093646
ISBN-13: 9780299093648
Edition: 1983
List price: $19.95
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nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;In 1859 a Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis, reflecting on his years as resident in the Vienna maternity clinic, wrote a graphic account of his attempt to diagnose and eliminate the then epidemic scourge of childbed fever.nbsp; The resulting Etiology triggered an immediate and international squall of protest from Semmelweis’s colleagues; today it is recognized as a pioneering classic of medical history.nbsp; Now, for the first time in many years, Codell Carter makes that classic available to the English-speaking reader in this vivid translation of the 1861 original, augmented by footnotes and an explanatory introduction.nbsp; For students and scholars of… medical history and philosophy, obstetrics and women’s studies, the accessibility of this moving and revolutionary work, important both as an historical document and as a groundbreaking precursor of modern medical theory, is long overdue. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;Semmelweis’s exposure to the childbed fever was concurrent with his appointment to the Vienna maternity hospital in 1846.nbsp; 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.nbsp; Intensely troubled by the tragic and baffling loss of so many young mothers, Semmelweis sought answers.nbsp; The Etiology was testimony to his success.nbsp; Based on overwhelming personal evidence, it constituted a classic description of a disease, its causes, and its prevention.nbsp; It also allowed a necessary response to the obstetrician’s already vocal, rabid, and perhaps predictable critics.nbsp; 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. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;Carter’s translation of this radical work, judiciously abridged and extensively footnoted, captures all the drama and impassioned conviction of the original.nbsp; Complementing this translation is a lucid introduction that places Semmelweis’s Etiology in historical perspective and clarifies its contemporary value.nbsp; That value, Carter argues, is considerable.nbsp; Important as a model of clinical analysis and as a chronicle of early nineteenth-century obstetrical practices, the Etiology is also a revolutionary polemic in its innovative doctrine of antisepsis and in its unique etiological explanation of disease.nbsp; As such its recognition and reclamation allows a crucial understanding, one that clarifies the roots and theory of modern medicine and ultimately redeems and important, resolute, pathfinder.