Sherwin B Nuland

Surgeon, scholar, bestselling author, Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Ignác Semmelweis with urgency and the insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience. Ignác 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...

The author offers a compilation of personal anecdotes and reflections based on his forty-year career in medicine as he explores various aspects of his discipline, how it is practiced around the globe, the lives of patients, and how the body works.

The remarkable stories told in this book are filled with the lessons of humanity. They describe that sacrosanct connection between two people we call the doctor-patient relationship, and that other relationship between the mentor and student, so important to the perpetuation of medical knowledge, judgement, wisdom and character.