Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
214 ETIOLOGY on the average of 418 per cent., and at Dubois’ Clinique 4‘55 percent. In the Paris Maternité the system of instruction is so arranged that the midwives are as much occupied with work which renders their hands foul with decomposed matter as medical students are elsewhere. Semmelweis draws chiefly upon Osiander,1 who visited Paris about fifty years before, and owing to the friendship of Baudelocque obtained special facilities for making observations. The Director of the Maternité was rather proud of his system of teaching, and yet Osiander found the pupils writing notes of the cases, and copying the expressions and details from one another although the cases were altogether different! This has its parallel in practices said to be prevalent in the junior schools in certain Spanish-American countries where a class of small boys are set the task of writing out the confession of their sins, and, to save the trouble of thinking, copy points from one another’s manuscripts. Osiander’s first episode probably only made his German readers smile over the vaunted superiority of the training of French midwives, when it was used as an argument for keeping medical men out of the practice of midwifery, but he describes proceedings of the gravest import bearing on the question of the etiology of puerperal fever. “The female pupils (midwives) usually attend the post-mortem examinations . . . which take place close to the Lying-in Hospital. I have often witnessed with astonishment the lively interest with which young women took part in the cutting up (zerfleischen) of the bodies, how they with bare and bloody arms and with large knives in their hands, amidst squabbling and laughter, cut out the bony pelvis to make preparations for themselves.” In eleven years—1798 to 1809—there were 17,308 1. Bemerkungen über die französische Geburtshilfe, nebst einer ausführlichen Beschreibung der Maternité in Paris. Hannover, 1813.
