Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
242 SPEYER MEETING blood in newborn infants,” we have read Dr. Bednar’s account of its almost complete disappearance and his cordial recognition of the reason : “ To the happy discovery of Dr. Semmelweis . . . who has successfully discovered the cause and the means of preventing puerperal fever.” Yet we shall find that in the great discussion of the London Obstetrical Society in 1875, very few English teachers of midwifery appeared to know so much of the Semmelweis discovery as was contained even in this letter published in a widely-read English medical journal a dozen years before. It is also obvious that Hecker in 1861 did not know of Dr. Bednar’s monograph on such an important subject as the disappearance of the fatal malady of blood-sepsis of the new-born published in 1852. Speyer Meeting. At the meeting of the German Society for the Advancement of Natural and Medical Science in September, 1861, the /Etiologieoí Semmelweis was much discussed. Virchow and Hecker were decidedly opposed to the Semmelweis Lehre; the only cordial and decided supporter was Professor Lange of Heidelberg. Lange declared that, since he began his professorial work at Heidelberg, he had been fighting puerperal infection according to the principles of Semmelweis by the strictest attention to cleanliness and by chlorine disinfection. At a stroke the puerperal fever epidemics vanished, and although there had been a few slight cases there had been only one death from childbed fever among 300 cases of labour (v. Waldheim, p. 186). Laying the blame of the continued devastation wrought by puerperal fever on the professors of midwifery, Semmelweis says in one of his “ Open Letters ” : ‘‘Of the great number of professors of midwifery, within the last fifteen years only two have recognised the truth of my discovery and applied it successfully and were at the same time so honourable as to publicly acknowledge their indebtedness to me.
