Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
V. Life in Buda-Pesth
LEVY 177 “Only in a few exceptional cases, when the cause of death is not puerperal fever, do we ourselves make postmortem examinations, taking care, however, that we do not willingly on the same day explore women in labour. . ... No precautions are taken except ordinary cleanliness; it is a very unusual thing for the staff to employ chlorine disinfection.’’ Semmelweis replied that he considered it more important to know what Levy believed to be the truth now after ten years’ experience, than what were his doubts ten years ago. He was quite well informed about the prevalence of puerperal fever at the Copenhagen Lying-in Hospital to such an extent as to have threatened the existence of that institution. He knew also that Copenhagen now possessed a new and excellent lying-in hospital; he would like to know why they had built a new hospital, and what had been their experience in it. Semmelweis devoted many unnecessary pages to Levy’s letters : in his usual pathetically patient way he went over the whole ground again, including in his argument even some of the well-known tables of statistics from the Vienna Hospital. It was a waste of time. The impression produced by Levy’s letters, quoted in the Stimme, is that they were the expressions of a quibbling pedant who had finally made up his mind; he knew much better about everything than Semmelweis could possibly know, and was not open to instruction from him. He knew about the contagious nature of puerperal fever long before he heard of Semmelweis. . . . Neither the observations mentioned, nor the opinions founded upon them, are expressed with the clearness and precision that could be desired in treating of such weighty questions of etiology. There is endless verbosity out of which emerges now and again some evidence of crass ignorance of the first principles of the discovery which he refuses to consider—five questions concerning the exact cause of death in the cadaver from which infection was supposed to be derived, questions about “ persons predisposed to infection,” and so on. “Puerperal fever M
