Epidemiology of puerperal fever: the contributions of Alexander Gordon.

The historical controversy regarding priority in the discovery of the contagiousness of puerperal fever' persists, most medical historians ascribing it to two nineteenth-century physicians: the American Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)2 and/or the Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis (I1818-1865).3 That conclusion, however, is not borne out by this study. It is true that Holmes was the first American physician to call puerperal fever a contagionspread by doctors in private practice-and forcefully and publicly to declare that "doctors were instruments of death" unless they cleaned their hands and clothes to