Word: fever
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...financial centers of the world last week, the gold fever spread like the blood-tingling news of a rich new strike. Day after day on the New York Stock Exchange, the cheap stock of a Philippine gold-mining company, Benguet Consolidated Mining Co., was among the heaviest traded. Wall Street's Bache & Co. was busily selling unrefined gold (the only kind that can be legally held in the U.S.) at premium prices ($44 an ounce). In London, South African gold-mining stocks were ones eagerly bought in a falling market...
...this speculative fever had been stirred up by the hope that the U.S. would raise the price of gold, and thereby devalue the dollar. To this, Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder had said no, a thousand times no. He had flatly declared that the U.S. will not change the price of gold, that it has not even considered such a move. Still, the gossip and gabble continued...
...August 1865, a bald, middle-aged man lunged through the streets of Budapest thrusting circulars into the hands of startled pedestrians. "Young men and women! You are in mortal danger!" they read. "The peril of childbed fever menaces your life! Beware of doctors, for they will kill you! Remember! When you enter labor unless everything that touches you is washed with soap and water and then chlorine solution, you will die and your child with you! . . . Your friend, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis...
...going mad. He had broken down in tears at a medical meeting; he had begun talking to himself in public places; his wife had already made arrangements to send him to an asylum. His circulars were a pathetic attempt to make the world understand the source of childbed fever before madness destroyed him. When all of them were distributed, he flung himself into the last gesture of his life. Rushing to the dissecting room of Pesth University, he slashed his fingers with a knife, plunged them "into the corrupt and rotting darkness" of a corpse. It was his final demonstration...
...study law but soon transferred to medicine. Six years later, as a provisional assistant in the Vienna Lying-in Hospital, he witnessed the horrors that were to haunt his life and give it purpose. One out of every three women who entered the First Division ward died of childbed fever; most victims' babies died too. In other parts of the world the story was even grimmer. At Jena over a four-year period, the death toll among infection victims was 100%. Among "causes" of the fever, doctors who had never heard of the germ theory listed wounded modesty, cosmic...