Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) and Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-1865): preventing the transmission of puerperal fever

Hearing of the death of a physician one week after performing a postmortem exam on a woman who had died of puerperal fever, Holmes began a thorough investigation and read a paper on "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement in 1843. Because the paper was published in the New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery,3 a journal with a very small circulation which ceased publication after only one year, it went largely unnoticed until it was republished in 1855 as a booklet entitled Puerperal Fever, as a Private Pestilence.4 Holmes argued the controversial view that physicians with unwashed hands were responsible for transmitting puerperal fever from patient to patient.