Upcoming Trent Lecture on Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis

Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: Room 217, Perkins Library
Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu or (919) 684-8549

Please join us on Wednesday, February 25, at 3 p.m. for our next Trent History of Medicine lecture. Constance Putnam, Ph.D, will present “A Revisionist View of the Semmelweis Story.”

Dr. Putnam has spent several years reviewing the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a nineteenth-century Hungarian physician and leading proponent of antisepsis. Problematizing a story that many historians think they know is a complex and special challenge, though there is evidence that Semmelweis was more than the ‘hand-washing guy.’ He had a very full, though brief, career as part of a vital and impressive medical community—a part of the tale that is generally ignored.

Dr. Putnam is a medical history researcher and writer from Concord, Massachusetts. Dr. Putnam was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship to visit Budapest in 2005-2006. Since then, she has returned many times, learning Hungarian in order to make use of several archives.

This event is sponsored by the History of Medicine Collections.

Post contributed by Rachel Ingold, Curator of the History of Medicine Collections.