Puerperal convalescence and the diseases of the puerperal period / by Joseph Kucher.

  • Kucher, Joseph.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Puerperal convalescence and the diseases of the puerperal period / by Joseph Kucher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    pay the attention to their fingers they would if they knew the dangers from unclean nails. Among the Austrian peasants it is a common belief that fresh wounds should not be touched with the nails, as this would produce suppuration. The daDger is not in the nails, but in the infectious matter which is car- ried upon or under the nails. ''Many a woman's death-warrant has been carried under the finger-nails of her physician'' (Emmet) is still more true for ob- stetrical than gynecological cases. Long finger-nails are as useful for an obstetrician as sand in the shoes ; the sooner we get rid of both the better. Another quite common mistake about antiseptic precautions is to believe that the labor has been con- ducted according to antiseptic principles, when the nurse has been allowed to cleanse the external genital organs of the parturient with the next best sponge or rag, and that the nurse was very clean in her ma- nipulations and understood antiseptic precautions. As the nurse can always throw the responsibility on the attending physician, we cannot expect that she will be as careful as the physician, who is always made responsible finally for all mishaps. Many physicians who know the dangers of infec- tion are not yet convinced that infection takes place only from manipulations in the genital tract, and they waste their antiseptic precautions somewhere else instead of concentrating them on the place where and upon the things from which infection