Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
V. Life in Buda-Pesth
170 VIRCHOW prevailed, and for a misfortune springing from general ignorance no one can be made responsible. But the shocking mortality of the Vienna Hospital brought about the discovery of the means by which the mortality from puerperal fever can be restricted to less than one in a hundred; whereas the shocking mortality at other places has had no other result than the filling of the dead- houses. What right has Veit to speak of the shocking mortality of the Vienna Lying-in Hospital, who still in the year 1855 opposes the methods by which the shocking mortality is prevented ? This is the same Veit who attributes the shocking mortality to atmospheric influences beyond our control and thereby condemns lying-in women to this shocking mortality for ever. “ With what right does Virchow lend the authority of his name to such opinions, the same Virchow who certainly has not attacked my doctrine because in his calm Ueberhebung (arrogance) he remains entirely ignorantof it, and is therefore stuck in such ignorance of the origin, the import and the prevention of childbed fever that in the year 1858, in the Berlin Obstetrical Society, he gave an address on the puerperal diseases at the Charité, and in it he admitted that the epidemic in the month of November caused 20 deaths ? He did not appear to reflect what a shocking, and at the same time what a criminal, mortality this was, occurring as it did eleven years later than the time when in Vienna they had learned the means by which the mortality might be brought down to under 1 per cent. . . . This fact is in some degree an indication of the shocking state of midwifery teaching in Berlin. . . . “ To say nothing of my students, of medical practitioners and surgeons, there are at the present time 823 of my pupil-midwives carrying on midwifery practice in Hungary, who know better than Virchow why the majority of epidemics of puerperal fever occur in winter, who know better than Virchow what to do in order to prevent puerperal fever when patients suffering from erysipelatous, croupous, putrid and purulent inflammation
