Gordon: childbed fever is brought to the woman by whoever attends her delivery
An early and unheard claim that childbed fever is brought to a woman by the particular person who delivers her or attends her in the first days, and not by 'bad air'.
The Scottish physician Alexander Gordon examined the Aberdeen epidemic of the late 1780s and early 1790s and found that the women who fell ill were those attended by particular midwives and particular physicians, himself among them. In the treatise of 1795 he writes that he could name in advance who would fall ill once he knew which midwife was to deliver her and which nurse was to attend her.
This is a claim about a carrier, made half a century before Semmelweis and without any germ theory, out of nothing but a book of names. It had no practical consequences: his colleagues turned away from the conclusion, and Gordon himself was traduced in Aberdeen.
Why this date
high: A Treatise on the Epidemic Puerperal Fever of Aberdeen, London, G.G. and J. Robinson, 1795. The imprint has been checked against the PubMed record (the «Classic pages in obstetrics and gynecology» series) and against the digitized copy on the Internet Archive. The epidemic the treatise examines is dated in the treatise itself (p. 1) from December 1789 to March 1792.
What grew out of it
-
Holmes: «The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever», a compilation of cases against the profession
influenced · Confidence: high
Holmes built his proof on Gordon: he quotes him directly as the man who suspected that he himself was carrying the disease and who could predict the outcome from the name of the attendant.
Dispute: The descent itself is not disputed: Holmes quotes Gordon in the text of the essay. The source found asserting the link is an encyclopedia entry of the Embryo Project (Arizona State University), not a monograph; the extent of the borrowing could not be checked against the essay itself within this piece of work.
Link sources
- Shaikh S. «"The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" (1843), by Oliver Wendell Holmes», Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University (2017) Verified 20 Sep 2026
Holmes quotes Gordon as saying that he suspected he was carrying the disease to patients and that he could predict which patients would die of puerperal fever based on who attended to them.
- Gordon A. «A Treatise on the Epidemic Puerperal Fever of Aberdeen» (1795), Holmes O. W. «The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever» (1843), Internet Archive, OCR (1843), 3 Verified 5 Oct 2026
I could venture to foretell what women would be affected with the disease, upon hearing by what midwife they were to be delivered, or by what nurse they were to be attended, during their lying-in: and almost in every instance my prediction was verified.
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.
- Shaikh S. «"The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" (1843), by Oliver Wendell Holmes», Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University (2017) Verified 20 Sep 2026
Node sources
- Gordon A. «A Treatise on the Epidemic Puerperal Fever of Aberdeen» (1795), Holmes O. W. «The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever» (1843), Internet Archive, OCR (1843), 2 Verified 5 Oct 2026
I could venture to foretell what women would be affected with the disease, upon hearing by what midwife they were to be delivered, or by what nurse they were to be attended, during their lying-in: and almost in every instance my prediction was verified.
- Gordon A. «A Treatise on the Epidemic Puerperal Fever of Aberdeen», London: G.G. and J. Robinson (1795), ix Verified 5 Oct 2026
while I was ufing my beft endeavours to mitigate the cala-mities of many miferable fufferers, feveral others were very bufy in traducing my character.
- de Costa C. «Childbed fever: A major cause of maternal mortality», O&G Magazine 11(1) (RANZCOG) (2009) Verified 5 Oct 2026
Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen, who noted similarities between puerperal fever and erisypelas. However, little attention was paid by the profession as a whole to these observations.
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.
Further reading
Not evidence: these carry no quotation and support nothing we wrote. They are books and scans to read next.
- Weissmann G. «Puerperal priority», The Lancet 349(9045), 122-125 (1997), 122-125