Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)

VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"

266 AS GYNECOLOGIST

best operators, v. Balassa, the professor of surgery, acted as assistant, in the presence of the most of the faculty of medicine of the University, and a large company of medical practitioners (einer zahlreichen Hörerschaft). The patient died fifty-two hours after the operation, and the autopsy showed the condition of parts that was to be expected—under the circumstances.

In spite of this failure, the operation was taken up in Buda-Pesth and in Hungary generally, and the results in the hands of Balassa, and later of Tauffer and Kézmárszky and others, soon became as favourable as any in Europe. They had only a bad start.

The rest of Semmelweis’s gynaecological work was of the usual kind, and scarcely calls for mention in detail. It was mostly published in the Orviso Hetilap, and therefore escaped the attention of European gynaecologists.

One contribution on Ovariotomy ran through eight numbers of that journal, and with illustrative cases in other numbers, it amounted to a monograph on the subject; but even then it remained unfinished. He wrote part of a manual of Gynaecology, and he appears to have made some progress with a work on Obstetrics, but the MS. could not be found after his death.