Alexander Gordon (physician)

Alexander Gordon MA, MD (20 May 1752 – 19 October 1799) was a Scottish obstetrician best known for clearly demonstrating the contagious nature of puerperal sepsis (childbirth fever). By systematically recording details of all visits to women with the condition, he concluded that it was spread from patient to patient by the attending midwife or doctor, and he published these findings in his 1795 paper "Treatise on the Epidemic Puerperal Fever of Aberdeen".^[1][2] On the basis of these conclusions, he advised that the spread could be limited by fumigation of the clothing and burning of the bed linen used by women with the condition and by cleanliness of her medical and midwife attendants. He also recognised a connection between puerperal fever and erysipelas, a skin infection later shown to be caused by the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes, the same organism that causes puerperal fever.^[3] His paper gave insights into the contagious nature of puerperal sepsis around half a century before the better-known publications of Ignaz Semmelweis and Oliver Wendell Holmes and some eighty years before the role of bacteria as infecting agents was clearly understood.^[3][4] Gordon's textbook The Practice of Physik gives valuable insights into medical practice in the later years of the Enlightenment. He advised that clinical decisions be based on personal observations and experience rather than ancient aphorisms.^[5]