Some notes about books I finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.) The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna. In this novel, Kavenna weaves together four tales on motherhood. The weaving of the four is both explicit and implicit. The first tale is a semi-fictional account of the last days of Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th century Viennese doctor who theorized that the deaths of many women just after giving birth was caused by an infection introduced by doctors who moved directly from performing autopsies on women who had died to assisting other women in the birth of their children. The women were dying of postpartum infection introduced by the doctors’ unwashed hands. Semmelweis conducted his own experiment, washing his hands in a chlorinated lime solution before assisting in a birth, and lowered the mortality rate of his patients dramatically. However, he had no explanation for why hand washing was effective — germ theory came later — and his medical colleagues refused to follow his advice. They ridiculed him and said he had no business instructing them about personal hygiene. Semmelweis didn’t deal with this rejection very well — he suffered a nervous breakdown, and died in an asylum after his colleagues had him committed.
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