Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
20Ó IMPORT OF CHILDBED FEVER woman and restricted in its incidence to lying-in women. We have met with the disease in pregnant women and in new-born infants without regard to sex. This is the disease which was fatal in the case of Kolletschka; and we find it affecting anatomists, surgeons, and patients who have undergone surgical operations. “ Puerperal fever is therefore not a species of disease : puerperal fever is a variety of Pyaemia. With the expression pyaemia different meanings are bound up: it is therefore necessary to explain what I mean by pyaemia. I understand by pyaemia a blood-poisoning, produced by a decomposed animal- organic matter. “A variety of pyaemia I call child-bed fever, because special forms of it occur in the genital sphere of pregnant parturient and puerperal women .... “Puerperal fever is not a contagious disease. By contagious disease we understand the sort of disease which itself produces the contagion by which it is propagated, and this contagion again produces in another individual the same disease. Smallpox is a contagious disease because smallpox produces the contagion by which smallpox can be reproduced in another individual. Smallpox produces in another individual smallpox and no other disease . . . For example, a person suffering from scarlet fever cannot cause smallpox in another individual. “Such is not the position with childbed fever : this disease can be produced in a healthy normal puerpera by a disease which is not puerperal fever . . . “Puerperal fever is not conveyed to a healthy puerpera unless a decomposed animal-organic material is carried to her. For example, a patient becomes seriously ill with puerperal fever, and when this puerperal fever runs its course without the production of a decomposed animal-organic matter, which appears externally, then is the disease not conveyable to a healthy normal puerpera. But when puerperal fever runs its course in such a way as to produce a decomposed matter appearing externally, then is childbed fever capable of being conveyed
