In 1795 Alexander Gordon, an Aberdeen physician, became the first to associated erysipelas with puerperal fever, and by the first decades of the nineteenth century the suspicion had arisen that both diseases were contagious.\u00a0 Among those harboring this suspicion was the American physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94).\u00a0 In a described case in which a physician\u00a0had examined the body of a man who had died of gangrene of the leg one day and the following day attended a woman who was giving birth.\u00a0 She, and six other women he had treated, developed puerperal fever.<\/p>\n At about the same time that Holmes published this essay, Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-65) became an assistant at the Vienna maternity clinic.\u00a0 There were two wards, one staffed by midwives, the other by medical students.\u00a0 He was puzzled by a maternal death rate of about 10 percent in the students’ ward compared with about 3.5 percent in that of the midwives.\u00a0 Following several months of investigation, he became convinced that the disease was transmitted by medical personnel from autopsied and dissected corpses to patients, and he introduced the procedure for medical practitioners of handwashing in a chlorine solution to sterilize them before approaching the sickbed.\u00a0 The results were impressive.\u00a0 The maternal death rate fell to less than 2 percent in his ward.\u00a0 His colleagues, however were not only not impressed, they were outraged at Semmelweis for suggesting that they, who were devoted to healing, could be agents of death.\u00a0 In the face\u00a0of this hostility, Semmelweis\u00a0resigned and moved to a hospital in Budapest.<\/p>\n There, in 1861, he published a major book on childbed fever in which he demonstrated that physicians who accompanied their dead patients to the autopsy room, and then returned to live patients in labor lost considerably more of those patients than did midwives who did not perform autopsies.\u00a0 Perhaps it\u00a0was the furor\u00a0and controversy that his book stirred up which led to his admittance to a mental hospital in 1865.\u00a0 Ironically it was discovered in the hospital that he had developed an infection in one of his hands that subsequently spread throughout his body and killed him.\u00a0 Semmelweis died of erysipelas\u00a0caused by the same pathogens that transmitted puerperal fever – the disease he had struggled to conquer.<\/p>\n Culled from:\u00a0Plague, Pox and Pestilence<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The\u00a0Ohio Penitentiary, also known as the\u00a0Ohio State Penitentiary, was a\u00a0prison\u00a0operated from 1834 to 1984 in downtown\u00a0Columbus, Ohio, in what is now known as the\u00a0Arena District.\u00a0The prison housed 5,235 prisoners at its peak in 1955. Prison conditions were described as “primitive” and the facility was eventually replaced by the\u00a0Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, a maximum security facility in\u00a0Lucasville. \u00a0A separate women’s prison was built within its walls in 1837. The buildings were demolished in 1997.<\/p>\n My friend Jim was fortunate enough to visit the prison before it was demolished, and he has recently gifted me some books that describe the horrifying conditions inside.\u00a0\u00a0The following is an excerpt from the book\u00a0The Ohio Penitentiary: 1899<\/a>:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/112522-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nSemmelweis<\/em><\/p>\nOhio Prisoner Du Jour!<\/h3>\n