Rating: 
Summary: Like all Men of Greatness....
Review: ...Semmelweis was met with constant opposition. He devoted his life to a cause he believed in. He wanted nothing for himself, just to see lives saved. Morton Thompson does an excellent job of pulling you right into the story from the beginning of the book. Semmelweis, like Columbus, Pasteur, and Galileo (and many others!) had knowledge of a truth, and the desire to share that truth with others. For this, he was despised and opposed. I totally enjoyed this book !
Rating:
Summary: Thank You!
Review: I read this book as a 9 year old in an old 'Reader's Digest'compendium and it made a huge impression on me, that sometimes people have to die before the truth is accepted as such. I have just re-found Louise Wilson's 'This Stranger My Son' which I read at much the same age and it made me cry all over again. Then I remembered 'The Cry and The Covenant' and I had to get that too. We know what happened to Semmelweiss. I wonder what happened to Louise's son. If you never read another book about medicine, do read these two.
Rating:
Summary: DON'T READ ALL OF THESE REVIEWS
Review: Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis perhaps did as much to relieve suffering and death as anyone in history. Untold millions are alive today because of the dedication of this tortured man. What he discovered together with the related work of Joseph Lister, changed virtually everything that is done in medicine. The tragedy of the existence of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis is that his work was never recognized until after his untimely death. Morton Thompson's biography of Semmelweis, The Cry And The Covenant, is a superb literary achievement, almost equal to the man himself. The Cry and the Covenant is a must for everyone in the health care professions, a must for everyone who cares about history, discovery, or medicine. The book is so skillfully crafted that you get inside the man, dreaming his dreams and feeling his despair. Readers will be filled with the exhilaration of the discovery that could save the lives of thousands of women. "A man of sorrows, rejected and aquatinted with grief"appropriately fits this man who, after his death, became a "savior" to so many millions. Even though the story is tragic, knowing that good ultimately triumphs, lifts the spirit and gives hope to those who struggle today. The book was recommended to me by a neurosurgeon whose life has shown that "the more things change,the more they stay the same." Time and technology have wrought infinite changes in the way we live. Great progress has been made but the nature of man has remained the same. "We build the machine wonderful but do we build the man?" We can find in modern medicine today (indeed on the internet) all of the individuals in the book. There are Semmelweises today and there are those who reject them. (Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer, who discovered the cause of most breast cancer (book "Dressed to Kill") are modern Semmelweise examples. Another most certainly is John Gofman (book "Preventing Breast Cancer") If you only read two biographies in your lifetime, The Cry And The Covenantshould be one of them.
Rating:
Summary: All Star Book for Me
Review: Recently I began to develop my list of all-star books, those that affected my life or at least my way of thinking. I read The Cry and the Covenant many years ago, in my teen years. This story of Ignaz Semmelweiss is not just remarkable; it is mind-boggling. His contribution to society as a whole and medicine in particular was shadowed by Joseph Lister in later years, probably because Semmelweiss sacrificed his life to prove his theory of microbial infection. His love of people, his depth of sorrow at the loss of so many women during childbirth prompted his study and ultimate discovery of the reason for their demise. The medical world did not accept his theory so he proved it in the only way he could. From this book I began to lean toward a career in the health field. Semmelweiss' name is not often heard but those of us who read this book know his story, recognize the importance of his work, and mourn the loss of a champion of people.This is a book all young adults should read to better understand the meaning of the word hero.
Rating:
Summary: All Star Book for Me
Review: Recently I began to develop my list of all-star books, those that affected my life or at least my way of thinking. I read The Cry and the Covenant many years ago, in my teen years. This story of Ignaz Semmelweiss is not just remarkable; it is mind-boggling. His contribution to society as a whole and medicine in particular was shadowed by Joseph Lister in later years, probably because Semmelweiss sacrificed his life to prove his theory of microbial infection. His love of people, his depth of sorrow at the loss of so many women during childbirth prompted his study and ultimate discovery of the reason for their demise. The medical world did not accept his theory so he proved it in the only way he could. From this book I began to lean toward a career in the health field. Semmelweiss' name is not often heard but those of us who read this book know his story, recognize the importance of his work, and mourn the loss of a champion of people.This is a book all young adults should read to better understand the meaning of the word hero.
Rating:
Summary: A book that changed my life
Review: Recently, when my stepdaughter, just starting her junior year in college, told me of her desire to become a physician, I thought of this book because it was THE BOOK that I read as a teenager that made me want to become a physician. I have never, in 33 years of medical practice, forgotten it's emotional force though it's been perhaps 45 years since I devoured it. I'm sending it as a gift of encouragement to her.
Rating:
Summary: The Cry and the Covenant is the best book I have ever read.
Review: The Cry and the Covenant, Morton Thompson's masterful novel, is the tragic story based on historical fact, about Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician who discovered the cause and prevention of puerperal (childbed) fever in the mid-1800s.
His discovery preceded the notion that microbes caused infection, and doctors of the time often believed that "miasmas," mysterious atmospheric influences, caused diseases.
Meanwhile, their complete lack of antiseptic procedures was the primary cause of the deaths of thousands of mothers and their newborns all over the world. Dr. Semmelweis repeatedly demonstrated in meticulously controlled studies that if doctors, nurses and midwives simply washed their hands before examining or treating patients, mortality rates would (and, in fact, did) plummet.
The medical establishment essentially ignored him and continued to cause the deaths of thousands of women and babies, a negligence Semmelweis called murder. Semmelweis died a young man, never having his discovery acknowledged and implemented by his peers, broken and destroyed over what he knew to be the gross negligence of his fellow medical colleagues. Thompson moves his readers with ease into this historical period as well as into the emotional turmoil of this fine and courageous doctor.
I felt the anger, frustration, pain and sorrow of Semmelweis.
I still do. Lawrence Berk
Rating:
Summary: An account of a saintly man who loved all women.
Review: This account of the life of Albert Ignaz Semmelweis is very close to the non-fictional reference that Morton Thompson used. The intellectual dishonesty of most of the physicians of the period who were informed of Semmelweiss's findings that washing of the hands with soap and water, followed by chloride of lime solution was essential for saving the lives of woman in labor. He suffered because physicians failed to understand that he wasn't just talking about cadaveric material as a cause of peurperal fever, but any decomposed material. In his final frustration with rejection, he slashed the stomach of a female cadaver, slashed his fingers, and stuck his fingers into the openings in the female body. He died of peurperal fever in a few days, with the hope that his act would help them to understand that all living things, not just women, could fall victim to the same malady as befell womem who died in percentages as high as 60% in some hospitals in the world.
Rating:
Summary: It¿s all about hand washing. Life-changing book. Ten stars.
Review: This book is OLD. I mean, I'M old, and I read The Cry and the Covenant when I was a teenager, waaay before the era of feminism, women's rights, etc. And it blew me away. I'm sure it's partly responsible for my decision to go to nursing school, work in obstetrics, become a midwife, and write a memoir (Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife) of my experience doing home births in Berkeley, CA.
In a nutshell, it's a meticulously-researched tale of historical fiction about the life and ultimate death of Ignaz Semmelweiss during the era before the discovery of the germ theory. He noticed that women delivered at home by midwives usually lived, while those delivered by doctors in hospitals usually died. Hmmm, he thought (this was a man who lived way before his time, before the concept of scientific thinking had even been expressed), what's different about these two situations? Midwives work only with healthy women who deliver in their own beds. Doctors, wearing bloody aprons and showing off their bloody hands as badges of status and honor, went from the autopsy room to delivery room, where several women often lay on the same sheets before someone had time to change the bed linen.
Semmelweiss set up a successful experiment, insisting that the medical students in his hospital ward wash their hands between patients. The women stopped dying.
Did the other doctors proclaim him the new hero? What do you think? They did not. They instead castigated him for suggest that they do anything so demeaning as wash their hands - and they self-righteously refused to even consider that perhaps they themselves were the cause of childbed fever (puerperal sepsis) that killed more than half the women who came under their misguided care.
Lister got the credit a generation later for proving the efficacy of aseptic technique (it's all about hand washing), but it was upon the foundation of Semmelweiss's pioneering groundwork that he built his edifice. By then, Semmelweiss was dead of madness brought on by utter despair and by his own hand: he exposed himself to the bacteria that caused childbed fever and died of it.
God. Read this book. Then read the newest book on this subject, The Doctor's Plague, by Sherwin Nuland. I hope somewhere there's a statue of Semmelweiss or an obstetrical ward that bears his name.
Rating:
Summary: A compelling passionate book about a true hero of medicine
Review: This is one of the best books I've read in my lifetime. I read it first in my early teens and I has haunted and inspired me about what kind of a human and latter a physician to be. It is the story of Ignaz Semmelwiess, a 19th century physician-midwife who discvered the reason for childbed fever in an era when people knew nothing about contagion. But it's also about the influence a person can have if they have integrety to fight for their beliefs, and how much a person can accomplish with sufficient drive and passion. It's a beautifully written compelling book!
|
