Notebooks of unsung hero of childbed fever acquired by Wellcome Library
5 June 2008
Over two decades he kept a meticulous record of ten cases that he treated, of which eight were fatal. The three sturdy notebooks cover his entire working career, and reveal how an intelligent and humane practitioner responded to life on the medical frontline in the era of cholera and childbed fever.
The materials provide an illustrated account of how doctors dealt competently with these challenges despite the limitations of their profession at the time.
Storrs was a thoroughly modern practitioner; although he did not have any more tools than his predecessors, he was using the stethoscope by the 1830s.
He died in 1847 of typhus contracted in the line of duty attending the sick poor in the local workhouse. His work probably had very little effect beyond his own practice; had he lived, his pioneering discoveries might have had more impact.
Readers of these notebooks can only begin to imagine the mental torment faced by Dr Storrs when he began to realise that the women with childbed or puerperal fever he was treating were probably dying because of an infection that he himself was transmitting between them.
The revelations in these documents are pertinent given recent anxieties about hospital superbugs and drug-resistant infections in hospitals throughout the world.