Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
OPEN LETTERS 245 Lying-in Hospital of Vienna and at no time were its ravages more appalling than in the year before Denham’s visit. Denham, obviously under the Braun influence, says : “In my opinion the poison is often taken into the system perhaps for days before labour sets in ”; a very comfortable belief. And then he asks: “May we not, therefore, fairly infer that puerperal fever possesses quite as much, if not more, of the epidemic as of the infectious character ?” Such was the doctrine of puerperal fever taught at the most important lying-in hospital in the United Kingdom a dozen years after Simpson recognised the truth, and had the moral courage frankly to proclaim his change of creed, and five years after Murphy’s article in the Dublin Quarterly. It only required the importation of a certain amount of French influence, chiefly under the auspices of Robert Barnes, almost to complete the ruin of British Science regarding the etiology of puerperal fever. The salutary counter-influence came from Simpson and the Edinburgh school which ultimately triumphed. But for it British Obstetrics would have deserved all the uncomplimentary criticism passed upon it by Hegar many years later than the Mastership of Dr. Denham of Dublin. The Open Letters. After the publication of the JEtiologie Semmelweis was busy for a time in sending copies of his book to his personal friends and to medical societies all over Europe, and with the correspondence arising out of that pleasant occupation. In the Stimme he had relieved his mind over the opposition to his teaching and practice, and he might now have turned with more advantage for the cause of progress to his own professorial duties, to gynaecology, and to his daily routine work; but he had become exasperated with his opponents, and he still watched for every reference in the medical press of
