Word Meaning Quick Check
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Feature
"Ignaz Semmelweis Saved Lives: Wash Your Hands"
by Dr. Howard Markel
Historians are quick to remind that Semmelweis was not the first physician to make this clinical connection, one that many expectant mothers of the era called “the doctor’s plague.” For example, the obstetrician Alexander Gordon Aberdeen, Scotland, suggested in his 1795 Treatise on the Epidemic of Puerperal Fever that midwives and doctors who had recently treated women for puerperal fever spread the malady to other women. More famously, in 1843 Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Harvard anatomist and self-proclaimed “autocrat of the breakfast table,” published “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” in which he discerned that disease was spread by physicians and recommended that actively practicing obstetricians abstain from performing autopsies on women who died of puerperal fever as one of their “paramount obligations to society.”
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Question
Use paragraph 10 from the article “In 1850, Ignaz Semmelweis saved lives with three words: wash your hands” to answer the question.
Using the context and the suffix -cian, which means “having a certain skill or art,” define the word obstetrician.
(1 point)
Responses
a doctor who specializes in the transmission of certain diseases
a doctor who specializes in the transmission of certain diseases
an expectant mother who is afflicted with an illness
an expectant mother who is afflicted with an illness
a doctor who specializes in the care of women during pregnancy and childbirth
a doctor who specializes in the care of women during pregnancy and childbirth
a worker who conducts autopsies on people
a worker who conducts autopsies on people
a doctor who specializes in the care of women during pregnancy and childbirth
The correct definition of the word obstetrician, based on the context and the suffix -cian, is:
a doctor who specializes in the care of women during pregnancy and childbirth