Puerperal Fever Treated by Turpentine

Puerperal Fever

Puerperal Fever

commend curetting in acute cases, an operation which is practically condemned by all modern writers. No mention is made of any other operative treatment such as pelvic drainage, hysterectomy, ligature of pelvic veins, removal of tubes or ovaries, etc., all of which may have to be considered under certain conditions, nor does he seem to be aware that the treatment of puerperal septicaemia by mea...

"The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever? (1843), by Oliver Wendell Holmes

In 1843, physician Oliver Wendell Holmes [2] wrote and published "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever," an essay about puerperal fever, a disease that occurs mainly as a result of bacterial infection in the uterine tract of women after giving birth or undergoing an abortion [3]. In the essay, Holmes argues that puerperal fever is spread through birth attendants like physicians and midwives wh...

The lesser pestilence: non-epidemic puerperal fever.

Puerperal fever was first described by Hippocrates.1 However, the epidemic form of the disease does not seem to have existed before the mid-seventeenth century, when "an unknown affection occurred at Leipzig in 1652 and returned again in 1665. It attacked puerperal women and was so deadly that but one in ten escaped".2 Sporadic outbreaks were recorded over the following century3 until the winte...

A New Mode of Treating Puerperal Fever

on puerperal fever, as it is fully described in many of our works on midwifery, and my object is merely to bring more prominently under the notice of the Society a mode of treatment which I have been induced to recommend, from its successful results in diseases of a similar nature, as well as in the few cases of this disease in which I have had the opportunity of employing it. For, although I h...