Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
312 OBSTETRICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON ... It seems as if the puerperal state itself was the condition of the development of this set of symptoms . . . None of us can describe at all wherein the alterations of the blood consist. Dr. Snow Beck’s speech consisted of a commentary on what had already been said in the discussion. He thought it is worth w7hile to controvert the opinion that puerperal fever was a disease sui generis ... “ Dr. R. Ferguson, in his admirable essay on “Puerperal Fever,” wherein he correctly attributes the most serious diseases to a vitiation of the fluids, though the nature and source of this vitiation is not so clearly stated as perhaps it might have been.” One expression of opinion may be quoted as curious and interesting in marking a stage in the evolution of the pathology : “Laceration of the perinaeum may exist at the same time as want of contraction in the uterus, but it is the wrant of contraction in the uterus which admits the septicaemic condition of the system to be induced, not the laceration of the perinaeum ” Hysteron proteron : the cart before the horse ! Dr. Routh recalled his experience at the Lying-in Hospital of Vienna in 1846 and 1847, and bore testimony to the results of the Semmelweis discovery— “One point in regard to the disease was clearly brought out—namely, that it was not contagious from one person to another.” Routh was not the young and inexperienced man of the Medico-Chirurgical Society Meeting in 1849, and it is disappointing to find a certain suggestion of retrogression in his opinions. Under the home-influences he has ceased to hold clear views about the effects of the zymotic diseases in puerperal women . . . “Some cases as not contagious and some are.” He should have remembered amidst the floods of self-satisfied ignorant verbiage and reserved clear scientific statements of truth to which he w7as listening, that under the principles of Semmelweis no disease could be the cause of puerperal fever unless it produced a decomposed animal matter
