Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
V. Life in Buda-Pesth
176 LEVY S-Etologie, but it does not appear to have reached him in any form. When Semmelweis had resolved to prepare for publication an account of his Doctrine, he set to work in feverish haste to collect opinions from the chief teachers of obstetrics in Europe. He had been watching for years the incidence of puerperal fever as recorded in the medical journals at home and abroad, <ánd he knew where to apply for information not yet published. Levy. In the spring of 1858 he addressed a letter to Professor Levy, of Copenhagen, requesting some account of his experience of the incidence of puerperal fever during the last ten years. Semmelweis knew that Michaelis, of Kiel, who was the first professor of midwifery to accept and put in practice the principles of the Lehre, had sent a translation of the letter from Vienna to Levy in 1848. Michaelis had also translated into German and written an introduction to an account of the “ Practical Teaching of Midwifery in London and Dublin,” published in the Bibliothek for Laeger, written by Levy after his return to Copenhagen from London. Semmelweis was so pleased with the introduction of Michaelis that he wrote in the Attiologie (p. 152): ‘T cannot refrain from giving verbally the introduction of the translator of this report.” Michaelis called attention to the efforts made by English obstetricians to banish puerperal fever from their institutions, and the large measure of success which had crowned their work. He also referred to the discovery of Semmelweis, and spoke of the happier times in store for the lying-in hospitals. Levy, who had come in some measure under British influence, was now a sort of contagionist, but not quite emancipated from the old errors of the epidemicists. On receipt of the first letter from Semmelweis in 1858 Levy replied by referring him to the publication of 1848. He added by way of supplement that the Copenhagen students have no longer anything to do with dissection during their six months’ clinical course of midwifery.
