Holmes was a physician before he was a poet, and this collection opens with The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, the 1843 paper arguing that doctors carried childbed fever from patient to patient — years before Semmelweis, and furiously resisted. Homoeopathy, medical teaching and the young practitioner’s duties follow.
One of the great papers in medical history, and the essays around it. Download the free EPUB.