Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis (Great Discoveries Series) Book

A doctor, reading about a doctor in a book written by a doctor, would seem to be doctorly, at the very least. But Dr. Semmelweis lived in the nineteenth century, Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland is a surgeon and an academic physician I have admired from afar, and this reviewer turned to a book published seven years ago because of how timely it was for his own medical book, curently being written--hint, hint to all editors and agents--by way of measuring how a doctor writes about a doctor, or, in my case, quite a few of them over my ten years in medicine, basically 1960 to 1970. Before writing this I looked over reviews by other members of this book and have nothing to add to those excellent reviews. What I gleaned from reading this book was that a doctor author may both praise a doctor (Simmelweis) and in the same work provide a cogent analysis of what the doctor did not do that he could have done to avoid criticism and other humiliations that conspired to ridicule him and probably contribute to his early demise. Doing so a century and a half after the fact is both more difficult in its required research and less risky to the author for the obvious reasons. These are things I will keep in mind. The other matter is that of arrogance, which Dr. Semmelweis voiced in full measure, and which was not entirely absent in the doctors I write about. But the main thing I learned here is that my own arrogance has all along been one of my greatest enemies, and the love of my wife and family have redeemed me, a self-imposed outcast from medicine, from the fate the plagued doctor suffered 150 years ago.