A review by siria
The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis by Sherwin B. Nuland
2.0
I'm not saying that only formally-trained historians can write history books, but I am saying that this book is a solid example of the kind of bad history that a non-historian can produce when writing about a topic that they're in many ways quite knowledgeable about.
Sherwin Nuland was a physician, and so knows what he's talking about when it comes to puerperal fever—a possibly fatal form of infection or sepsis that can be contracted by post-partum people—and the technical processes by which the Hungarian-born Ignać Semmelweis discovered the disease's causation in the mid-nineteenth century.
He's on much shakier ground, however, when it comes to understanding the history of medicine, claiming that physicians didn't really understand that their ideas needed to be based on evidence until the nineteenth century and demonstrating little familiarity with the scholarship on pregnancy and childbirth during the Middle Ages and in early modern Europe. Nuland engages in retrospective diagnosis about Semmelweis' apparent mental illness towards the end of his life—something which historians are extremely wary of, given how difficult it is for physicians today to diagnose a patient whom they've not seen in person.
And then there's the weird, fictional intro where Nuland imagines a virginal upper-class Viennese teenager who gets pregnant and is kicked out of the house by her "Papa", so is taken in by her former maidservant and ultimately dies shortly after giving birth from puerperal fever. It's weird and creepy, and also unnecessary given how many real life women actually died an agonizing death from it—but then again, throughout Nuland seems not particularly interested in writing a history which centres women overly much.
Sherwin Nuland was a physician, and so knows what he's talking about when it comes to puerperal fever—a possibly fatal form of infection or sepsis that can be contracted by post-partum people—and the technical processes by which the Hungarian-born Ignać Semmelweis discovered the disease's causation in the mid-nineteenth century.
He's on much shakier ground, however, when it comes to understanding the history of medicine, claiming that physicians didn't really understand that their ideas needed to be based on evidence until the nineteenth century and demonstrating little familiarity with the scholarship on pregnancy and childbirth during the Middle Ages and in early modern Europe. Nuland engages in retrospective diagnosis about Semmelweis' apparent mental illness towards the end of his life—something which historians are extremely wary of, given how difficult it is for physicians today to diagnose a patient whom they've not seen in person.
And then there's the weird, fictional intro where Nuland imagines a virginal upper-class Viennese teenager who gets pregnant and is kicked out of the house by her "Papa", so is taken in by her former maidservant and ultimately dies shortly after giving birth from puerperal fever. It's weird and creepy, and also unnecessary given how many real life women actually died an agonizing death from it—but then again, throughout Nuland seems not particularly interested in writing a history which centres women overly much.