Publisher Description
Surgeon, scholar, bestselling author, Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Ignác Semmelweis with urgency and the insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience.
Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately—childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared—they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end.
Download and start listening now!
About Sherwin B. Nuland
Sherwin B. Nuland, MD, is clinical
professor of surgery at Yale, where he also teaches bioethics and medical
history. In addition to his numerous articles for medical publications, he has
written for the New Yorker, New Republic, New York Times, Time, and
New York Review of Books. He writes a
regular column for American Scholar
entitled The Uncertain Art. He lives in Connecticut with his family.
About Peter Lerman
Peter Lerman is originally from New York City where, coincidentally, these stories are set. Peter has narrated over 150 audiobooks and has won an AudioFile Magazine Earphones Award® in 2020 for one of them. His specialty is nonfiction—biography, history, government and politics, business, science, medicine, and technology. In 2023 Peter recorded the first audiobook production of Upton Sinclair’s Boston: the Documentary Novel of Sacco and Vanzetti.