M.D. Sherwin B. Nuland’s “The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis” investigates the Childbed Fever epidemic of the seventeenth century. The author, Dr. Sherwin B.Nuland, was once a world-renowned surgeon who spent one-third of his life practicing medicine, as well as, researching and educating others of his findings (Gellene, 2014, para.1). He meticulously wrote this book to capture the attention and educate curious disease lovers everywhere. The details of this story are very illustrative. If you like uncovering medical mysteries, learning about historical physicians of the seventeenth century, and reading about gruesome symptoms, this is the book for you.
The book begins with a hypothetical scenario of a young girl who undergoes the scary process of pregnancy and childbirth. This short story intrigues the readers because it is relatable to our contemporary society due to the fact that there is a 30% chance for young girls in …show more content…
As Nuland claims “The seventeenth century is often—and correctly—called the century of science or the era of the scientific revolution, but much of the theorizing of that intellectually exhilarating era was based on an uneasy mixture of meticulous observation confounded by unprovable speculation. ”(2014, pg.32). In other words, at this time period, the ideas of science and research were freshly being explored. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was the first to ever mention childbed fever, although he himself did not understand nor cure the disease. There is a huge controversy in this book deciphering whether or not this disease was even contagious. Knowledge of medicine, in general, was very limited, but that did not stop physicians from trying to gain a grasp on this deadly