Gordon's treatise on puerperal fever

Between December 1789 and March 1792 an epidemic of puerperal fever struck women after childbirth in Aberdeen. Alexander Gordon, a farmer's son who had studied at Marischal College and been a surgeon in the Royal Navy, had been physician to the Aberdeen Dispensary since 1786. He cared for 77 of the women himself, and by his own count 28 of them died.

Gordon followed each case back to its attendant. The disease, he found, seized only women who had been visited or delivered by a practitioner, or nursed by someone, who had already attended a patient with the fever. Women in outlying villages delivered by local midwives escaped it. His case records follow single midwives carrying the infection from one woman to the next, and he became so sure of the pattern that he could foretell which women would fall ill once he knew which midwife would deliver them.

He did not spare himself. He wrote that he had carried the infection to a great number of women. In his treatise, published in London in 1795, he urged that the patient's clothes and bedding be burned or thoroughly purified, and that nurses and physicians wash themselves and have their clothes fumigated before wearing them again. His treatment was another matter. He relied on vigorous bleeding and purging, and he claimed that all who were bled recovered.

Medical colleagues, midwives and the public of Aberdeen were openly hostile to his ideas. Gordon died of tuberculosis in 1799, aged 47, shortly after ill health forced him to retire. The treatise was reprinted in Edinburgh, Philadelphia and London over the next half century. No likeness of him survives, and his memorials in Aberdeen are a small plaque on the house he lived in and a gravestone.