{"id":1677,"date":"2009-12-22T11:50:53","date_gmt":"2009-12-22T17:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/?p=1677"},"modified":"2009-12-22T11:50:53","modified_gmt":"2009-12-22T17:50:53","slug":"notes-from-the-rare-book-room-a-private-pestilence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/2009\/12\/22\/notes-from-the-rare-book-room-a-private-pestilence\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes From the Rare Book Room &#8211;A Private Pestilence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1678 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/files\/2009\/12\/holmes-port.jpg\" alt=\"holmes-port\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/files\/2009\/12\/holmes-port.jpg 531w, https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/files\/2009\/12\/holmes-port-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/files\/2009\/12\/holmes-port-298x300.jpg 298w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/>Puerperal fever, often called childbed fever, ravaged obstetrics patients in the U.S., Britain, and Europe throughout the 18<sup>th<\/sup> and 19<sup>th<\/sup> centuries.\u00a0 Its symptoms included severe abdominal pain, fever, and debility and carried a mortality rate as high as seventy percent during some epidemics.\u00a0 Even though the greatest incidences occurred in close-quartered\u00a0 \u201clying-in hospitals,\u201d (state-supported maternity hospitals) only rarely did the notion of contagion figure into the arguments and these were largely ignored.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) published, <em>The contagiousness of puerperal fever<\/em>,in <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">The New England quarterly journal of medicine and surgery<\/span>.\u00a0 In this moving, lucid, and somewhat acerbic paper, Holmes, then a prominent Boston physician and lecturer, demonstrated conclusively the contagious nature of childbed fever and, based on his and his colleagues experiences, showed that the dreaded disease was carried on the unwashed hands of the physician from patient to patient.\u00a0 Holmes also set forth strict guidelines with regard to hand-washing, cleanliness, and physician isolation to avoid and cut short epidemics.\u00a0 Sadly, Holmes\u2019 warnings went largely unheeded partly due to the fact that his paper was published in a little-known journal but mostly because the medical establishment was unwilling to entertain the notion that \u201cgentlemen physicians\u201d could harbor disease.\u00a0 Several years later, Vienna physician, Ignac Semmelweis (1818-1865), independently, verified Holmes\u2019 conclusions by means of a controlled study based on hand-washing.\u00a0 Even so, the contagiousness of puerperal fever was denied by many prominent physicians until the acceptance of the germ theory of disease in the late 1800\u2019s at which time Holmes\u2019 words from 1843 finally rang true:<\/p>\n<p><em>Whatever indulgence may be granted to those who have heretofore been the ignorant cause of so much misery, the time has come when the existence of a private pestilence in the sphere of a single physician should be looked upon not as a misfortune but a crime.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Puerperal fever, often called childbed fever, ravaged obstetrics patients in the U.S., Britain, and Europe throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.\u00a0 Its symptoms included severe abdominal pain, fever, and debility and carried a mortality rate as high as seventy percent during some epidemics.\u00a0 Even though the greatest incidences occurred in close-quartered\u00a0 \u201clying-in hospitals,\u201d (state-supported maternity<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/2009\/12\/22\/notes-from-the-rare-book-room-a-private-pestilence\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Notes From the Rare Book Room &#8211;A Private Pestilence&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}