The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1843, enlarged 1855
- Language
- English
- Length
- Short · 50 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Moderate2 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendMedical Essays 1842-1882Houghton Mifflin, 1891Holmes's own collection of his medical writing, containing the 1855 version with its added introduction; public domain.
These links go straight to Amazon and Bookshop.org and earn this site nothing today. Prices are the same either way. How this works.
A paper read to the Boston Society for Medical Improvement in 1843 by Holmes, then a young physician and not yet famous as a writer. Assembling reported cases in which one doctor or midwife attended a run of women who died of childbed fever while colleagues in the same town had none, he argued that the disease is carried from patient to patient on the hands and clothes of their attendants, and laid down rules for physicians, including staying away from midwifery after performing autopsies. The claim was attacked by leading obstetricians; Holmes reissued the paper in 1855, four years before Semmelweis published.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.