Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
I. Introduction
INTRODUCTION 5 for the first time to convey to English readers an impression of the actual contents of the works of Semmelweis, especially of his chief work, “Die Hitiologie.” Translation would have been a comparatively easy task, but the book is so full of repetitions, largely owing to its construction by throwing together a series of separate articles, sometimes without due regard for sequence and symmetry, that a simple translation would have made tedious and far from attractive reading. Even then biographical and historical material in elucidation would have been essential. Then the statistics : the tables are one of the most striking features of the work and testify to the marvellous industry and earnestness of the author, but the vast mass of them have ceased to interest because they served this purpose long ago; they consequently are now of no value except historically : details may well be forgotten. Their spirit still lives in the conclusions which have found expression in the midwifery practice of the last forty years. The sequence of events has been followed rather than the original order of the matter in the book, so as to present the contents in a sort of biographical and historical order. Special care has been taken to render justice to the story of the Discovery as given by Semmelweis himself, supplemented and explained occasionally when possible by the statements of his personal friends. The autobiographical material in the “Hitiologie” is always interesting, but it is rather scanty in amount. The work itself has long been inaccessible even in the German language. This difficulty has recently been removed by the publication in 1905 of the Collected Works of Semmelweis (Semmelweis’ Gesammelte Werke) edited by Dr. Tiberius von Gyóry, of Buda Pesth, under the auspices of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences—a patriotic enterprise greatly to the honour of Hungarian Medicine. An effort has been made in the long chapter on“Some Forerunners and Contemporaries’’ to settle the question
