Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
288 ROBERT BARNES as also by the results observed in my own Clinic, that the so-called street-births (Gassengeburten) are scarcely ever followed by puerperal fever.” It will be remembered that this was denied by Zipfel and others for a purpose —opposition to Semmelweis. Then again : “ The epidemic prevalence of puerperal fever in Berlin during the winter of 1870-71 may with strong probability be attributed to the employment of so many of the civil practitioners in the military hospitals.” It is not possible from all this to evade the conclusion that Martin had accepted the Semmelweis Lehre in full, though it would have been somewhat irrelevant to have introduced a formal confession of faith in this particular contribution on the subject of puerperal fever. Robert Barnes, 1865. By an article by Dr. Robert Barnes, published in the Lancet in 1865, the reader is carried away into the past, and then set aside to repose in a back-water outside the stream of progress. We think it is no exaggeration to say that the influence of Robert Barnes, in spite of the enlightened teaching of Simpson and Matthews Duncan and some provincial lecturers to counteract it, hampered the introduction of scientific principles with regard to puerperal fever in England, for a quarter of a century. According to Barnes in 1865 pregnancy often produces a profound alteration of the blood. . . . Mauricean called pregnancy a disease of nine months. . . . Boerhaave said: Foemina plurimis afficitur malis ex solá graviditate. . . . Before labour comes on the constitutional conditions arising out of pregnancy have already developed a high susceptibility to the invasion of febrile and infectious disorders. . . . In 1866 appeared the work of Professor Winckel of Rostock, on the “ Pathologie und Therapie des Wochenbetts,” which attracted general attention among obstetricians even beyond the boundaries of Germany.
