Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
II. Parentage and Nationality
8 SCHOOL EDUCATION royal palace, and only separated by the Danube from Pesth, the most populous and flourishing of all the Hungarian towns. To claim Semmelweis as an Austrian would be just as fair and reasonable as to claim any distinguished Irishman of Ulster whose forebears had been in the North of Ireland for the generations since the Revolution and “Boyne Water” as a Scotsman, because he bore a Scottish name, or to claim even Parnell or Emmet, the Irish patriots, as Englishmen, because their names were not autochthonous Irish. Semmelweis was a true Hungarian by birth, temperament and education, and he and his brothers proved in the troublous times of revolution and civil war that they were Hungarian patriots who could make great sacrifices for the Fatherland. SCHOOL EDUCATION. In due course the boy Ignaz went to an elementary school. Education was then at a low ebb in Hungary, and the education of Semmelweis was from first to last upon the whole unsatisfactory. The children in a Hungarian-German Community had to make use of the two languages and Semmelweis is alleged, on by no means conclusive evidence, never to have mastered either so as to speak without dialectic accent or to write with facility in the style of a well-educated man. His schools and schoolmasters must be blamed for the deficiencies which he himself called “an innate aversion to every thing which can be called writing.” That he spoke German with an accent proves nothing. Some of the most distinguished professors of his time in Vienna lectured with an unmistakeable Wiener dialect. The education of the grammar school or gymnasium was just as defective in its way as that of the elementary school. The pupil was not to blame. He was a clever boy with a ready tongue, full of energy and warmth of heart and imagination which found copious expression, until, with adolescence, he was overtaken by the self- consciousness by which he lost confidence in his capacity
