Rating: 
Summary: Thank You!
Review: This novelized biography of medical pioneer Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss, a Hungarian physician, is surprisingly interesting. Semmelweiss lived and practiced medicine in Europe in the 19th Century, predating the groundbreaking work of Louis Pasteur who eventually proved that microbes cause disease and leading medicine to include as an important tenet aseptic and antiseptic technique. Cry and the Covenant paints a compelling picture of a time when doctors took no precaution whatever to make sure that their persons and instruments were clean. Puerperal fever, also known as childbed fever, took the lives of a huge percentage of women who gave birth in hospitals, to the point that intelligent women didn't want to go to the hospital for delivery of their babies for fear of dying. Semmelweiss was a great observer and, although no one had made the connection between the microorganisms (as seen by Leeuwvenhoek through his microscope a century earlier) and diseases, Semmelweiss began to conduct experiments to determine why some large groups of women nearly always contracted puerperal fever and other groups did not. Eventually he demonstrated that personal cleanliness on the part of physicians could prevent the disease, though he did not know precisely why that was so. The data Semmelweiss collected proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was correct, but his peers would not listen to him. In an era where infectious and contagious diseases were thought to be caused by a variety of irrelevant things, doctors refused to wash their hands before delivering babies. One would have thought they would have given Semmelweiss's theory and data a try in the interest of saving their patients' lives, but their commitment to their belief systems in place about disease, to blissful ignorance and the status quo meant that what Semmelweiss actually knew was true didn't make the least bit of difference, except to his own patients. Semmelweiss followed scientific method in gathering his data that would be sound even today, but doctors back then didn't know what scientific method was, let alone what it could actually prove or disprove beyond unsubstantiated tradition and belief. This novel is worth reading because, in the end, the reader will have a pretty accurate and compelling picture of just how godawful and relatively useless medicine was before the work of Louis Pasteur and how fortunate we are today. Medicine still can't cure a number of illnesses, but what it can do nowadays is pretty amazing, especially in light of the egregious damage doctors once did. Can anyone today imagine doctors in the process of dissecting cadavers as part of medical education and then going to deliver a baby without even washing their hands, let alone changing clothes or sterilizing their instruments? The story of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss is as inspiring as it is frustrating, and though The Cry and the Covenant is a novel, it is written engagingly and the main thread of the story is factual. For me, this was a difficult book to put down and demanded continuous reading through the end.
| 
