Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
208 ETIOLOGY and assuming that under Boer the mortality was almost entirely from self-infection, an attempt is made to obtain the actual amount of self-infection now prevalent. The whole theory was founded on error, and though the reader must admire the patient industry with which Table xviii. was compiled, and the logical reasoning founded on the premisses assumed to be true, he cannot be surprised at the unsatisfactory conclusion. The problem of the proportion of fatal cases of puerperal fever from self-infection to those from conveyed infection is not solved. It was insoluble then and remains so still. Towards the end of Der Begriff the author returns to the mortality of the three lying-in hospitals with which he has been connected, and leaves the case of each in a rather indefinite position : he succeeds in conveying to the reader the unsettled condition of his own mind on the relation of self-infection and conveyed infection. “At the Obstetric Clinic of Pesth, I lost in the first year of my official work, out of 514 patients, 2 from puerperal fever. In the second year, out of 551 lying-in women, 16 died from puerperal fever. In the third year, out of 449 lying-in women, 18 died from puerperal fever. The high mortality of both these years was the consequence of infection from without by means of filthy bed-linen.” Etiology. After some recapitulation of what has been stated under Begriff Semmelweis proceeds : This is the place for subjecting to criticism the hitherto accepted Etiology of puerperal fever in as far it maintains the bringing from without of a decomposed animal organic material : this is the place to test how far the decomposed animal organic material is made to originate in the individual herself. . . . All that part of the hitherto prevailing etiology of childbed fever which includes neither the bringing of a decomposed animal organic material from without nor the production of such a material within the individual,
