Childbed fever: a documentary history
نویسنده
چکیده
cleaning up the houses and streets under their charge. This emphasis upon the amelioration of mortality extended to the occupational categorization adopted in the published reports on the successive decennial census of the second half of the nineteenth century. Classes were defined in terms of the materials with which and the manner in which people worked. There was no attempt at an economic analysis based on a hierarchy of incomes or on control over the workplace. Indeed, the distinctions between masters and men, and between workers and dealers were but poorly treated by the Census classification. Eugenicists, such as Galton, wanted class analysis to demonstrate that the unfit were reproducing too quickly and swamping the contracepting elite. The General Register Office consistently sought to thwart the use of official statistics in support of such a hereditarian model. Stevenson, instead, reconceptualized the social hierarchy as based on rationality not inheritance. Placing professionals, rather than the aristocracy, at the top, and then dividing the working class by levels of skill, an altogether more optimistic picture was presented of a lag between top and bottom rather than of an accumulation of degeneration at the base, and of a progressive future in which the whole working class could invest in its children to raise the overall level of skill. This is an audacious work and requires such detailed review that this short note can do little more than commend it to demographic, medical and intellectual historians.
منابع مشابه
Catching babies: the professionalization of childbirth, 1870–1920
maternal mortality, were initially promoted as additions to existing practices rather than major innovations. The volume also provides a wonderful resource for anyone teaching the history of germ theories of disease. The documents from the period 1850-1904 (chapters 10-16) first show pre-germ ideas and then how bacteriological understanding was adapted into existing frameworks often with little...
متن کاملScientific Inquiry:
As a simple illustration of some important aspects of scientific inquiry let us consider Semmelweis' work on childbed fever. Ignaz Semmelweis, a physician of Hungarian birth, did this work during the years from 1844 to 1848 at the Vienna General Hospital. As a member of the medical staff of the First Maternity Division in the hospital, Semmelweis was distressed to find that a large proportion o...
متن کامل150 years since “The etiology, concept, and prophylasix of childbed fever”
2011 marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of “The etiology, concept, and prophylaxis of childbed fever”, the magnum opus of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis’ (1818–1865) determined, but not infrequently self-defeating, efforts to prove his theories regarding this disease. Now widely regarded as “the father of infection control”, his struggle to improve patient safety continues to p...
متن کاملThe Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever
Medicine’s highest duty is saving threatened human life, and obstetrics is the branch of medicine in which this duty is most obviously fulfilled. Frequently it is necessary to deliver a child in transverse lie. Mother and child will probably die if the birth is left to nature, while the obstetrician’s timely helping hand, almost painlessly and taking only a few minutes, can save both . I was al...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
- Medical History
دوره 41 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1997