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A Deadly Fever: An Elmer Pfefferkorn lecture from the 1980s
In this film footage from the 1980s, microbiology professor Elmer Pfefferkorn intrigues medical students with a lecture on puerperal (childbirth) fever. He tells how in the 1840s, Oliver Wendell Holmes (who taught at Dartmouth and Harvard medical schools) and Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis independently discovered the cause of the fever—which was killing some 30% of women who gave birth in hospitals. To learn more about Elmer Pfefferkorn, read "An Amazing Human Being."
Video
Elmer Pfefferkorn has been teaching DMS students
for more than 40 years.
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