The Story of Puerperal Fever--1800 to 1950

Abstract

Fanu's (1951) bio-bibliography of Jenner makes it clear that Jenner's active mind concerned itself with many things.Apart from his famous work on vaccinia and the prevention of smallpox, he wrote about the curious nesting habits of the cuckoo, the migration of other birds, the hibernation of hedgehogs, distemper in dogs, coronary occlusion in relation to angina pectoris, and the treatment of tetanus.But, so far as I can ascertain, he did not write anything about puerperal fever, although as a country pract t oner it must have often come to his notice.Like smallpox it was one of the major hazards of adult life in those days, and there is little doubt that Jenner sometimes reflected upon its distressing and puzzling features.It so happened, too, that the publication of Jenner's famous inquiry into the nature of vaccinia and the results of vaccination (Jenner, 1798) almost coincided with the first major advance in knowledge about the aetiology of puerp2ral fever.Both occurred in the last decade of the eighteenth century-those fertile years that produced the French Revolution and so many other notable events.Of course, the history of puerperal fever goes back a long way beyond Jenner's time, but I propose to deal with its development only from that time till 1950.Those of us who are older know very well the tragedy that this fever used to be even in the early days of this century.We can recall the young mother who had gone through the hazards of her first pregnancy and the great adventure of her first confinement, and had brought forth a healthy child, only to be struck down a day or two later by the fatal fever.Or it may have been an older woman, who had already borne several children, and then, follow-ng a later confinement, developed fever and quickly died, leaving a father and his young family to fend for themselves.I imagine that all of us, if we were to trace back our family history for two or three generations, would come across one or, more likely, several instances in which this dreaded fever had carried off our female forebears.In my own family there have certainly been two or three such tragedies.Owing to these distressing circumstances there can hardly be any disease which has brought more poignant sorrow to the human race.There are no reliable figures for the annual death rate from this cause before about 1880, because the certification of deaths was not satisfactory, but from that *Jenner Memorial Lecture delivered at St.

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