Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
SCANZONI beyond all doubt; and Hirsch has illuminated the question with few but striking words. ... Of an epidemic in the true sense of the term we can no longer speak. . . . Instead of considering the air of a lying-in ward of a hospital to be the chief vehicle of infection “some have endeavoured to explain this observation in another way. This explanation is to the effect that the carrying of deleterious matter from one sick patient to another is not effected through the medium of the atmosphere, but that the putrid material is transferred by means of the hand of the examining practitioner, by means of insufficiently washed bed-linen ... an opinion which in the most recent years has found a very zealous champion in Semmelweis. . . .” Hecker has declared that this standpoint is one-sided, narrow and therefore erroneous, and Scanzoni must equally to-day, as eighteen years before, declare in the most decided way that it is sheer waste of labour to endeavour to explain the frequency and virulence of the puerperal diseases of lying-in hospitals in this way alone. . . . “We are still of the opinion that it is chiefly miasmatic influences in lying-in hospitals which lie at the root of the diseases most frequently affecting lying-in women. ... It affords real satisfaction to observe that Semmelweis, who at first attributed puerperal infection in lying-in hospitals almost exclusively to cadaveric poison, felt compelled later to assign a suitable recognition to other ways of infection. . . . Further we cannot and will not leave unmentioned that Semmelweis, by his restless and self-sacrificing efforts in this field, has achieved a great service to lying-in women in our hospitals. ...” The reader who has observed with some modicum of attention the course of the controversy, since Scanzoni first attacked Semmelweis until now when the author of the Astiologie was under the sod, must be shocked by the hateful and unprincipled controversial methods here introduced (suggestio falsi, suppressio veri). Progress only during the last ten years : the hypothesis of spread 291
