Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)

V. Life in Buda-Pesth

always been the case,” they said, “ and it will be always so.”

‘‘The fatalism of such an answer was revolting, and with the ardour and confidence of youth I attempted to discover the cause of epidemics of puerperal fever, and the means of preventing them.”

Tarnier, like Semmelweis, was struck with the sterility of the pathological anatomy accepted then in explanation of puerperal fever, and in face of the doctrinal anarchy which universally reigned, he set resolutely to work by a new method.

First of all he endeavoured to find if it was true that puerperal fever ravaged the whole of Paris, and particularly if it raged around the Maternité the same as in the hospital itself. After prolonged and patient investigation he made out that the mortality from puerperal fever in the arrondissement in which the Maternité hospital was situated was only the seventeenth part of that of the hospital. Tarnier demonstrated scientifically, mathematically, that the famous genius epidemicus could not climb over the walls of the Maternité.

A few years later the same fact was proved to be true of all the lying-in hospitals of Europe by Tarnier’s friend, Leon Le Fort.*

Five years is a long time for a mere student of medicine, and Tarnier did not know then about the work of Semmelweis, and the episode of Arneth’s address to the Académie de Médecine de Paris in January, 1851, on the means proposed by Semmelweis to prevent puerperal fever epidemics in the lying-in hospital of Vienna, was probably unknown to him. Even if the subject had been mentioned to Tarnier later, when he could understand it, he would have only heard the disdainful misrepresentations of Dubois, the Summum forum obstetricium, and of Danyau and other obstetric oracles who formed the Committee that never reported on Arneth’s address, and who actually did mislead him in the relative incidence of puerperal fever in the city * Des Matemités.

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