Alexander Gordon
Aberdeenshire, Scotland, 1752 - 1799
About MeAlexander Gordon helped change the way we understand disease. Alexander was the first physician to provide overwhelming evidence that puerperal, or ‘childbed’, fever was contagious and could be transmitted from patient-to-patient by doctors and midwives.
Born into a farming family in Logie, Aberdeenshire, Alexander studied medicine at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. In 1785 he spent nine months in London, developing a specialist interest in midwifery. On returning to Aberdeen, he witnessed a severe epidemic of puerperal fever. Having seen the disease during his time in London he was able to correctly identify it, and through detailed observations and meticulous notetaking, showed that the disease was spread by a small number of midwives.
After more than a century of relative obscurity Alexander Gordon’s Treatise on the Epidemic Puerperal Fever of Aberdeen, published in 1795, was finally recognised as a masterpiece of early epidemiology.
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