Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
V. Life in Buda-Pesth
TARNIER a work on La Fievre puerperale observée á 1’hospice de la Maternité. It had evidently been kept back till after the discussion out of respect for his superior officers. Tarnier was as zealous and firm in propagating his opinions as Semmelweis; there was no moral cowardice about him; but he was more prudent and worldly-wise. He conciliated men in influential positions, and promotion came rapidly. There was opposition of course to the doctrine of the contagious, that is infectious, origin of puerperal fever by men in official positions who had during their professional careers missed the import of the malady, especially by Dubois. Tarnier says later : “In spite of the opposition made me by my master it was to the demonstration of this truth, until then misunderstood in France, that I consecrated the greatest part of my Thesis.” Tarnier became Surgeon-in-chief to the Maternité in 1867, and from that position he continued to urge upon the authorities the adoption of measures of prevention, chief among which was the isolation of infected puerperae; but it was not until 1871 that he succeeded in attaining his object. The puerperal fever mortality of the institution was then 9'3 per cent, but we should keep in mind the wretched condition of the patients during the war and the Siege of Paris. The constituted authorities had been difficult to move; they had for years resisted overwhelming evidence. In the years 1861—1862 for example 1,169 women out of 14,199 died in the hospital; in the city of Paris 559 lying-in women died out of 99,991 confined. Tarnier exclaimed over the report: “1,090 women in two years or 545 per annum struck down to death in the hospitals who would have been probably spared if they had been confined in the city. These figures go beyond all probability : one hesitates to write them down. Such a mortality becomes a public calamity, and it ought to disappear from the day that it is known.” Tarnier had said in his Thesis that the cause and nature of the blood-poisoning was still unknown, but 191
