Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
248 OPEN LETTERS faith has acquired a fundamental knowledge of all your errors and delusions. “ The responsibility for the errors of your disciple rest upon you only, Herr Hofrath; I have therefore nothing to do with Dr. Otto v. Franqué; my business is with you alone. . . . “. . . In the essay referred to we read that in the Lying-in Institute of Würzburg . . . out of 99 patients 30 sickened from puerperal processes and 9 died. “These cases of sickness and death were called an epidemic which was produced by certain undefined atmospheric influences. “ I deny that these cases of illness were due to atmospheric influences, and I maintain that these cases were produced because to the patients in one way or another some decomposed matter was conveyed from without, and that these are therefore cases of resorption-fever. . . . . . . Your ignorant division of inflammation in childbed into those which are not puerperal fever and those which are puerperal fever, has been already referred to. But I have proved in my treatise that your inflammations, which are not puerperal fever, are just as genuine puerperal fever as your hyperinosis, your pyaemia, and your blood-dissolution . . . All the forms of inflammation are produced by access of decomposed matter, they are all resorption-fever, and they can all be prevented by chlorine disinfection. “You see, Herr Hofrath, howT readily all the phenomena of childbed fever can be explained when the only true cause of childbed fever is recognized; whereas you explain the unknown by yet unknown atmospheric influences . . . The greatest service rendered by my Doctrine is that it teaches how the unhappiness wrought by the malady can be with certainty prevented : that it prescribes to the practitioner a recognized active method of prophylaxis. Your teaching, on the other hand, puts upon the practitioner the stamp of the Turk who, in fatalistic passive resignation, permits the disaster to overwhelm his lying-in patients.”
