Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
210 ETIOLOGY different institutions which used to be afflicted yearly with frightful so-called puerperal fever epidemics, I have brought about a condition of things in which a case is met with only now and again. Even the most stubborn defender of the epidemic theory of puerperal fever could hardly call this state of matters an epidemic. And when occasionally the number of fatal cases has increased, it could always be proved that the more numerous fatal cases were not caused by epidemic, that is to say, atmospheric, cosmic, telluric influences, but that they were always the result of conveying a decomposed animal organic material to the individual owing to breaches of my rules and injunctions. If puerperal fever were produced by atmospheric, cosmic, telluric influence it could not be prevented, and behind this unavoidability the epidemicists entrench themselves and disavow responsibility for the ravages of puerperal fever, and they do nothing to diminish its incidence. “ I admit that I would be helpless in face of such influences, but nevertheless if I succeed in preventing this disease which is declared to be unpreventable I produce proof that the disease does not depend upon unpreventable atmospheric cosmic telluric influences and I demonstrate that the disease results from a removable (entfernbar) cause; and that removable cause is decomposed animal organic material. . . . It was the endeavour to prevent the access of such material to individuals entrusted to my care, that brought success in the reduction of the mortality, not because I had found the secret of making epidemic influences innocuous. . . . The sickening and dying of many individuals from the same disease within a definite time does not complete all that is implied in an epidemic, else would every battle be an epidemic, for in a battle many individuals die from the same cause in a definite period of time. . . . Semmelweis next discusses the question whether puerperal fever occurs like real epidemic diseases at some definite season of the year, and he proceeds to prove by
