The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever is an essay that Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a young Boston physician, read to the Boston Society for Medical Improvement in 1843 and printed in a short-lived medical journal. Puerperal fever, or childbed fever, was an infection of the womb after childbirth that killed many mothers in the first days after delivery, sometimes in clusters around a single doctor or midwife.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. · CatalogOliver Wendell Holmes Sr.Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. · CatalogOliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894) was a Boston physician, Harvard professor of anatomy and dean of its medical school, and a celebrated poet and essayist, author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and the poem 'Old Ironsides'.The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
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