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

II. Parentage and Nationality

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

9

for spoken or written language, and he even exaggerated his deficiencies.

The defective school education of the physically strong and restless lad had some advantages : it did not cram him with knowledge, it did not make him prematurely a too sedative and receptive student, and it left him with a natural eye and an unsophisticated mind. He acquired no prepossessions, and he never learned how to bow down before authorities, like so many of the unfortunate young pedants whom he had to encounter as antagonists in after years. It may have been the result of want of mental discipline in early youth, or it may have been the outcome of certain idiosyncraciesof intellect and temperament, but one of the salient features in the controversial method of Semmelweis, when fighting for his doctrine, was a want of reverence for the verba magistri, and a capacity for going straight to the heart and relevant parts of a question. Defective conventional school education had left his vision clear to see only what was to be seen, and his intellectual faculties free—so that he could think for himself and form independent judgments and logical inductions from the facts of experience.

v. Waldheim is our only authority for the defective and dialectic speech of Semmelweis. But this fact is beyond controversy—when he began to lecture on midwifery in Buda-Pesth, with the choice of three languages in which to address his students, Latin, German and Hungarian,—he employed the Hungarian language, while all his colleagues spoke in German, v. Gyory also calls attention to the fact that his portraits, almost without exception, present him wearing the Hungarian national dress worn by men of his social position.

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION—GENERAL AND PROFESSIONAL.

After two years at the University of Pesth devoted to the study of “ philosophy,” which no doubt meant the attendance at lectures on literature and the classical languages, including Latin, which was not yet dead, but was still the formal language of the educated Magyar,