Hospital Infection

The continuing battle to control hospital infections has ranged from the earliest days of hospital care when bad air or miasma was thought to be the cause, to the present day emergence of antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" such as MRSA and necrotizing fasciitis. This social history of hospital care surveys the rise, fall and re-emergence of new nosocomial infections and documents the development of medical microbiology and infection control.

Foreword by Bill Newsom; Preface; 1. Theories of infection: magic to miasmas; 2. Middle Ages to seventeenth century: hospitals and infection; 3. The eighteenth century: hospitals and infection; 4. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: typhus in military and civilian hospitals; 5. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: lying-in hospitals and puerperal infection; 6. The nineteenth century before Lister: military hospitals and wound infection, civilian hospitals and 'hospitalism'; 7. Theories of infection: miasmas to microbes; 8. Antisepsis to asepsis; 9. The twentieth century: hospital design and miscellaneous infections; 10. The twentieth century: emergence of antimicrobial chemotherapy and the demise of the haemolytic streptococcus; 11. Sterilization, the development of sterile services and disinfections; 12. The mid-twentieth century: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus; 13. The mid-twentieth century: gram-negative infections; 14. The control of staphylococcal and gram-negative infections; 15. Surveillance of infections and organisation of infection control; 16. New and re-emerging infections; 17. The past, present and future; Index.