Sherwin B. Nuland: The Doctors’ Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, And The Strange Story Of Ignac Semmelweis

Some intellectual advances are dramatic enough to leap out of history and spike the context they've created, while others play like the cumulative results of workaday toil, neat but ill-equipped to command much present-day wonder. It's no secret that the divide has less to do with history than with how it's told, but The Doctors' Plague goes a long way toward reaffirming how startling ideas don't automatically lead to gripping stories. Part of the "Great Discoveries" series that recently produced Everything And More, a book pairing David Foster Wallace with the history of infinity, Doctors' Plague traces the ideological origins of germs, which were hypothetical phantoms when Ignac Semmelweis conceptualized them in the 1840s. As a young doctor in Vienna, Semmelweis focused on "childbed fever," a mysterious, grisly condition that killed off countless women after childbirth. In 1847, one of every six women in a certain labor-ward wing of Vienna's Allgemeine Krankenhaus died as the result of an epidemic that swept Europe in fits and starts. Though it was advanced for its time, the storied hospital was still filled with "pus-soaked sheets" and medical students flitting between cadaver dissections in the "deadhouse" and probing pelvic exams on birthing mothers. As more of those mothers came down with childbed fever, doctors in search of a cause volleyed some predictably naïve theories, from clogged-up milk tracts to compressed fecal matter to the general moods of women and the world they lived in. Armed with meticulously kept records and a mind for advances in anatomical science, Semmelweis dreamt up an idea that would prove to be a real forehead-slapper in retrospect: Doctors transmitted disease by failing to properly cleanse their hands between patients. It's worth noting that, at the time, invisible organisms (bacteria) seemed no more plausible than cosmic causes, but author Sherwin B. Nuland fails to translate that into riveting friction. Instead, he presents a dry tale bogged down by interdisciplinary politics and Semmelweis' failure to prove his so-called genius. The Doctors' Plague outlines the intriguing rise of pathological anatomy–put simply, the practice of tracing diseases to their roots in specific organs rather than treating them as holistic conditions. But the book spends less time on ideas than on the embattled story of Semmelweis, whose frustrated descent into madness distracts from a discovery that ultimately seems pretty good rather than great.