Word: life
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...public places; his wife had already made arrangements to send him to an asylum. His circulars were a pathetic attempt to make the world understand the source of childbed fever before madness destroyed him. When all of them were distributed, he flung himself into the last gesture of his life. Rushing to the dissecting room of Pesth University, he slashed his fingers with a knife, plunged them "into the corrupt and rotting darkness" of a corpse. It was his final demonstration of a great discovery: six days later Ignaz Semmelweis died of childbed fever...
Author Morton Thompson (Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player) dignifies his novelized life of Semmelweis by steering clear of the soupy fantasies that make a lot of biographical fiction worthless. The Cry and the Covenant was read for errors by a leading Manhattan gynecologist, who found none. Even the inevitably idyllic love affair (at 38 Semmelweis married a girl of 18) is anchored firmly in fact. "An editor suggested that I have him fall in love sooner," reports Author Thompson. "I said, 'What do you want me to do-make him fall in love with an eleven-year-old girl...
Wounded Modesty. A Budapest grocer's son, hearty, robust Semmelweis went to Vienna in 1836 to study law but soon transferred to medicine. Six years later, as a provisional assistant in the Vienna Lying-in Hospital, he witnessed the horrors that were to haunt his life and give it purpose. One out of every three women who entered the First Division ward died of childbed fever; most victims' babies died too. In other parts of the world the story was even grimmer. At Jena over a four-year period, the death toll among infection victims was 100%. Among...
Steaming Caldron. "Wash your hands!" became the cry of Semmelweis' life. The medical world replied by nicknaming him the Pesth Fool and easing him out of his assistantship. The remaining years of his life were marked by almost incredible persecution. As director of obstetrics in the miserable, tenth-rate Pesth General Hospital, Semmelweis, working day & night to oversee his prophylaxis, finally managed to cut childbed fever mortality to zero. But his assistants sneered at him and his superiors refused to give him or his theories any credit. When his book, The Etiology, the Concept, and the Prophylaxis of Childbed...
Eugene Acevedo Granillo was only 20 years old, had no business hanging around a bar, and didn't know how to handle his liquor. For these missteps he paid last week with his life. Entering the 101 Café in Downey, a suburb of Los Angeles, he flashed a driver's license to prove he was 24. He ordered up a couple of beers while the jukebox was grinding out Jealous Heart, danced about, began fooling around the shuffleboard game. Then Granillo tossed a couple of heavy shuffleboard weights across the crowded room. Bartender Edgar Gray (at right...