A great medical detective story, by the author of the best-selling How We Die. Surgeon, scholar, best-selling author, Sherwin B. Nuland is one of our finest chroniclers of the history of medicine. Obsessed for twenty-five years with Ignac Semmelweis's strange story, Nuland tells it with the urgency and insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience. Ignac 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, they also threatened the medical establishment and so undid the passionate but self-destructive Semmelweis that he failed to overturn the status quo, leaving it to later medical giantsPasteur, Lister, and Kochto establish conclusively the germ theory of disease. The Doctors' Plague is a riveting, revealing narrative of one of the key turning points in medical history. About the series: W. W. Norton and Atlas Books announce the launch of an exciting new seriesGreat Discoveriesbringing together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughsthe great discoveries that have gone on to transform our view of the world.