Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
286 E. MARTIN reach their intelligence over the barrier of mistaken loyalty, preconception and jealousy. But there was a third class of fair-minded scientific obstetricians who accepted the evidence upon due consideration when it reached them, and when convinced gave practical effect to the new doctrine. We may take as a type of these Professor Edward Martin, of Berlin. Before the publication of the JEtiologie Martin, like other enlightened teachers of midwifery in North Germany, tried to prevent the spread of puerperal fever by simple hand-washing before examination, and by the abstention from midwifery practice for twenty-four hours at least after post-mortem examinations or dissection of any kind. We see in these measures probably the expression of the influence of Professor Briicke’s letter written to Professor Schmidt of Berlin on the discovery of Semmelweis in 1848, and the experience of Dr. Everken at the Paderborn School for Midwives. In 1864, Wegscheider published an account of an outbreak of puerperal fever in Berlin owing to the culpable practices of two midwives, and shortly afterwards Professor Martin described in detail the measures employed by himself at the Lying-in Hospital to prevent puerperal fever, or diminish to the utmost the number of cases. It is just the practice universal In England for half a century, with some improvements. The greatest care was taken to keep the person of the patient thoroughly clean, and to renew the bedding and bed- linen for each individual case : catheters and nozzles of douche-apparatus must be boiled before use. Among the measures of precaution it is interesting to find that nurses and midwives were forbidden to lay out the bodies of patients who had died in childbed. It took forty years more to introduce in England a rule to the same effect— still probably honoured more in the breach than the observance. Martin gave a fuller account than ever before of his nostrum, the import of diphtheritic inflammation of the female genitals, of the methods of its conveyance from the infected to the healthy, and conse
