The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis

Sherwin B. Nuland

Jun 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Peter Lerman

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

Peter Lerman is a narrator from the heart of New York City: Brooklyn born and raised. He has appeared onstage as Horace Vandergelder in Hello Dolly, Bobby Gould in Speed-the-Plow, the Governor of Texas in Best Little Whorehouse..., Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace, and Lenny in Rumors.