The British medical profession and contagion theory: puerperal fever as a case study, 1830-1860.
نویسنده
چکیده
AmR EXAMINING the reactions of physicians to sporadic, socially disruptive epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and the plague, historians have concluded that "anticontagionism" characterized medical thought in the first half of the nineteenth century.' That conclusion is not borne out by this study. It is true that well-known figures confronted with the task of explaining the capricious visitations of pandemic diseases rejected the theory of contagion. When attention is directed away from both the atypical disease and the eminent physician, a somewhat different attitude emerges toward "contagionism". Puerperal fever, a septic infection common to parturient women in the nineteenth century, was "a disease in which the proportion of deaths to recoveries far exceed[ed] that of malignant cholera...."2 Monotonous epidemics of this disease haunted physicians and provoked them into a sustained discussion over its contagiousness. By focusing, for the most part, on now forgotten practitioners and their response to an endemic disease, this study reveals that doctors who lost a succession of women to puerperal fever formed a saddened "contagionist" vanguard. Mid-nineteenth-century discussions regarding the contagiousness of puerperal fever took place within a context of animated professional rivalries and therapeutic uncertainties. The medical profession retained its hierarchical structure, a remnant of the medieval guild system. Physicians enjoyed more prestige than either apothecaries or surgeons, the latter being considered mere "cutters for stone"." Nevertheless, each group shared a common concern: the spread of disease. The profession
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Medical History
دوره 22 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1978