Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
ETIOLOGY 209 all that portion of the hitherto accepted etiology of childbed fever we shall not recognise as an etiological factor in puerperal fever. It is at the present time the most widely prevailing opinion in the medical profession that puerperal fever consists in a blood poisoning, and that the anatomical results of puerperal fever are only the expression of efforts to eliminate the poison from the blood. In this opinion I also concur. Among the causes which produce this blood-poisoning, men blame epidemic and endemic influences, emotional conditions, errors of diet, chilling, etc. My contention is that the blood-poisoning, without the exception of a single case, is produced through the absorption of a decomposed animal organic material which is either conveyed to the individual from without ... or which has originated in the affected individual herself, cases of self-infection. Armed and furnished with this conviction we shall now proceed to a criticism and estimate of the hitherto prevailing Etiology of puerperal fever. . . . We shall begin with the epidemic influences and give expression to our unshakeable conviction (unerschütterliche Überzeugung) that there are no epidemic influences capable of producing puerperal fever, that there never have been such epidemic causes of puerperal fever, and that the endless series of epidemics which are recorded in medical literature, were all preventible cases of infection from without, that is to say, that every one of the cases was caused by the conveyance to the individual from without of a decomposed animal organic material. The grounds for the confidence and courage with which I assail a belief several centuries old are the following : Before everything stands the unshakeable rock on which I have raised the edifice of my Lehre concerning puerperal fever, the factum, that owing to the measures which I have adopted and carried out from May, 1847, to the present day, 19th April, 1859, .... at three o
