ABSTRACT
Knowledge does not come without cost. Three centuries elapsed between the first epidemic of childbed fever and the discovery of penicillin. For three hundred years, physicians examined young women in childbirth, watched them die, dissected their corpses, and deposited their remains in unmarked graves. The doctors gained knowledge, but at the sacrifice of more lives than were lost in all the wars of those centuries. In towns and villages around the world are memorials that preserve, in honored glory, the names of men who died at war—men who, in hatred, killed one another, for causes that now seem empty and vain. But there are no memorials to the victims of childbed fever. Their sacrifice purchased knowledge that blesses all human lives with increased health and security.
