Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
ETIOLOGY 219 or sick puerpera are eliminated, and the consequence is a more favourable condition of the health of the patients in the English lying-in hospitals, where puerperal fever is believed to be contagious. How it happens that from the various sources numerous cases of infection may arise, Chiari gives some good illustrations in a contribution published in 1855. As one of the incidents at the Prague Lying-in Hospital, it is recorded that a woman suffering from endometritis septica died in the Lying-in Hospital, and that all the nine patients in the same ward, with only one exception, died in a few days. Septic endometritis was one of the diseases which Scanzoni excluded from the category of puerperal fever. Semmelweis was evidently so pleased with Chiari’s article that he incorporated it verbally in the Ätiologie. In order still more completely to prove that a better state of health invariably exists in lying-in hospitals where the opinion prevails that puerperal fever is due to a contagium, and measures are applied with the object of destroying the contagium, Semmelweis draws largely upon a work just published by Professor Levy of Copenhagen, and translated into German by Michaelis of Kiel. Levy’s subject was “ The Lying-in Hospitals and the Teaching of Midwifery in London and Dublin,” and his material was chiefly obtained in a recent visit to the chief towns of the United Kingdom. In the course of the introduction to the translation of Levy’s work Michaelis writes: ‘‘We must feel it our duty to thank our English colleagues for their example of fruitful endeavour, for the hope which we may now entertain of a happier future.” In this portion of the Etiology Semmelweis draws to a large extent upon the work of Levy supplementing his matter by quotations from the book of his friend Arneth,1 who devoted a Wanderjahr in 1850-51 to visiting the lying-in hospitals of France and the United 1. Ueber Geburtshilfe u. Gynsekologie in Frankreich, Grossbritannien und Irland, Wien, 1853.
