Abstract
THIS little book consists of two unequal and unconnected portions. In the first, which occupies only 34 pages, the writer, who is a qualified medical man but is best known for his authorship of the unconscionably long and dreary novel entitled “Journey to the End of the Night”, makes a frenzied attack on Communism as the result of a recent visit to Soviet Russia. The second part contains a lively and sympathetic account of the great Hungarian medical man, Ignaz Philip Semmelweis, who was a pioneer in the prophylaxis of puerperal fever in the pre-Listerian era, and died insane in 1841 at the age of forty-seven years after failing to convince his contemporaries of the truth of his doctrines.
Mea Culpa:
and the Life and Work of Semmelweis. By Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Translated by Robert Allerton Parker. Pp. x + 175. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1937.) 5s. net.
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Mea Culpa. Nature 142, 316 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/142316d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/142316d0