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Vienna General Hospital in 1784. Semmelweis worked at the maternity clinic. Copper engraving by Josef & Peter Schafer. Historically, puerperal fever was a devastating disease. It affected women within the first three days after childbirth and progressed rapidly, causing acute symptoms of severe abdominal pain, fever and debility.
Postpartum infections, also known as childbed fever and puerperal fever, are any bacterial infections of the female reproductive tract following childbirth or miscarriage. [1] Signs and symptoms usually include a fever greater than 38.0 °C (100.4 °F), chills, lower abdominal pain, and possibly bad-smelling vaginal discharge . [ 1 ]
Puerperal fever was a deadly infection, common in mid-19th-century hospitals. Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital 's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.
"The disease, known as Puerperal Fever, is so far contagious as to be frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses." [ 4 ] The end of the essay included eight steps which birth attendants needed to adhere to in order to prevent the spread of infection from patient to patient, especially infected patients to susceptible ...
Gordon's Treatise on the Epidemic Puerperal Fever of Aberdeen. Alexander Gordon was born in 1752 in the farmstead of Milton of Drum, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. [6] His father, also Alexander Gordon, was a tenant farmer at Milton of Drum, [7] some nine miles to the west of Aberdeen city centre. [6]
A postpartum disorder or puerperal disorder is a disease or condition which presents primarily during the days and weeks after childbirth called the postpartum period.The postpartum period can be divided into three distinct stages: the initial or acute phase, 6–12 hours after childbirth; subacute postpartum period, which lasts two to six weeks, and the delayed postpartum period, which can ...
Semmelweis did not live to see his findings contribute to the germ theory of disease. He began to become obsessed with speaking only about puerperal fever and developed Alzheimer's-type symptoms which led to him being placed in a mental institution in 1865. [19] That same year Semmelweis died from sepsis after sustaining wounds at the asylum ...
In this period, puerperal fever was endemic in maternity hospitals, with 16% of women contracting the disease after giving birth. The mortality rate was on average 30%, and higher in more overcrowded hospitals.