A recent Freakonomics podcast tells one of my favorite public health stories: how observant physician Ignaz Semmelweis figured out how to slash the incidence of childbed, or puerperal, fever, a disease that killed 10-15% of the women who gave birth in the doctor-staffed ward of the Vienna General Hospital in the mid-nineteenth century. (Death rates were similarly alarming elsewhere, since germ theory hadn't yet taken hold.)
As the podcast explains, Semmelweis observed that the death rate from childbed fever was lower among women who delivered babies in the ward staffed by midwives compared to…
Advertisment
