"Riveting" (Houston Chronicle), "captivating" (Discover), and "compulsively readable" (San Francisco Chronicle). Surgeon, scholar, best-selling author, Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Ign�c Semmelweis with urgency and the insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience. Ign�c Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately?childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared?they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end. The Doctors' Plague is a riveting, revealing narrative of one of the key turning points in medical history. About the series:Great Discoveries brings together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs?the great discoveries that have gone on to transform our view of the world.