A serious-looking medical history book from her mother's bookshelf sent Oxford author Rebecca Abrams on a five-year trail researching a long-forgotten medical genius who was 60 years ahead of his time.

She was intrigued by the story of Alexander Gordon, an Aberdeen physician who discovered that puerperal fever, killing scores of women, was spread by the very people who were supposed to cure disease - doctors and midwives.

Rebecca was riveted by the story, partly because it reflected her own family history. She said: "My mum had childbed fever when my brother was born. She described lying in this hospital bed with a temperature and she was beginning to hallucinate.

"A senior doctor came up and said, This woman has puerperal fever' and it was a medical emergency. She didn't die of it, because she was given antibiotics in time, but she had this book.

"It is still a killer, even in this country. We are complacent about it. People think about it as having been eradicated. Doctors and nurses don't see it enough, and people like us don't know about it, or think of it as being in the past.

"But with things like superbugs and antibiotic resistance, and cuts in midwifery and after birth care, it is becoming relevant today. And of course, in the Third World, it is still a killer and 500,000 women die every year."

It took her five years because she knew nothing about Aberdeen, and very little about 18th-century medicine. "I was captivated by the story - that mixture of medical history and personal tragedy. I thought Why has no-one heard of him?' Had he been listened to at the time, he would have saved the lives of thousands of women. What happened was not just a personal tragedy for him - it was a tragedy for women's health."

After several months of research, however, she reached an impasse. "There is not much known about him, and there were tantalising details about his wife. She had grown up in the West Indies and had income from slavery.

"There were so many questions that I decided that I could only do the story justice through fiction."

The result is Touching Distance, Rebecca's fifth book, but her first novel. Her other books are non-fiction; on subjects such as childhood bereavement and sibling rivalry. One book, Three Shoes, One Sock and No Hairbrush, was a UK bestseller, but she wanted a new direction. Her children, now 11 and 13, were growing up and she was about to move from her home in Kingston Road to Geneva, where her husband was working, so she needed a fresh challenge.

"I had always wanted to write fiction, and Alexander Gordon's story made me ask what it would be like to have this knowledge that you know will save your patients, and no one will believe you."

She used the bare details of his life - that he had a child who died and a reference in his treatise to a delay in publishing caused by the "complication of a domestic calamity". Her painstaking research started in the Bodleian Library, but included reading Gordon's original manuscript in Aberdeen, pouring over 18th-century maps of the town and spending time with tourist guides asking about the location of old buildings.

She said: "Seeing his handwriting, and the emotional passages which he deleted from the finished article, was very dramatic. I spent three days talking to people at the botanic gardens, trying to find out if there was a plant that would have been flowering in April 1790 with yellow flowers. I also found out about the child-snatching - children were stolen from their parents and sent to the West Indies to work on plantations. I grew up on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and that sent shivers down my spine."

She finished the book after returning to Oxford, where she has lived on and off for 20 years, and won a two-book deal. She is still wrapped up in the world of the "suicidally principled" doctor. "He was an opinionated, brilliant, tactless, committed man, amazingly adept at putting people's backs up, and he lived in a community the size of Summertown. It's difficult for us to imagine being in a world where germ theory didn't exist. They had no idea where disease came from - he knew he could save lives, and no one believed him. My heart went out to him. He was so brave and so committed, but he has never received the recognition he deserved."

Touching Distance, published by Macmillan next Friday at £12.99, is being launched at Waterstones in Broad Street, Oxford, on Thursday.