Part of the reason for this response, Nuland points out, was that the theory itself was unsettling.
#The doctors plague: germs, childbed fever and the strange story of ignac semmelweis series
Sherwin Nuland's book is meant to be a history of this discovery (it's part of a series called ''Great Discoveries''), but its punchiest plot is not so much the discovery itself as the intense response to it. Reviled and packed off to backwater Budapest, he spent his last years succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, disappearing quietly into that ultimate hedgehog hole, until he finally vanished altogether in August 1865. By then, Semmelweis was almost forgotten. It would take at least another decade, and a bewildering trio of giants, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, finally to lay the groundwork for a unified theory of medical microbiology. Semmelweis nearly found the answer - and so nearly invented modern germ theory - but he never managed to convince his peers. Between 18 - over a span of 15 years - Semmelweis, an obstetrician on the staff of the general hospital in Vienna, single-mindedly gnawed away at the roots of one of the most controversial puzzles of his time: the etiology of childbed fever, an agonizing lethal infection that struck women soon after childbirth. IF the fox knows many small things - to twist a phrase coined by the soldier-poet Archilochus - and if the hedgehog knows only one big thing, then Ignac Semmelweis, the peculiar Hungarian doctor at the center of ''The Doctors' Plague,'' was the essential hedgehog of 19th-century medicine.
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