Alexander Gordon (1752–99) and his writing: insights into medical thinking in the late eighteenth century

Alexander Gordon’s writing reveals nascent ideas about infectious disease, tensions in medical thinking in the time of the Enlightenment, but also a practice of medicinal therapy that resonates with that of the present day. His Treatise on the Epidemic Puerperal Fever contained observations and deductions which provided, for the first time, compelling evidence of the contagious mode of transmission of the infection by medical attendants.