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

VII. Last Illness and Death

HEGAR’S CRITICISM

313

which must be conveyed direct to the healthy puerpera.

All that was true in this discussion was in accordance with the principles of the Semmelweis Doctrine : everything else was erroneous.

hegar’s criticism.

Concerning this discussion, Hegar says in a long Note to his “Life and Doctrine of Semmelweis’’ some things which make painful reading for the British gynaecologist. Much that he says must be regretfully admitted to be too true, but to the writer and his countrymen we would submit “with all respect,’’ as the barristers say to the judges on suitable occasions for remonstrance, that Hegar exhibits a certain national bias which ought to be foreign to science. Science is, or ought to be, cosmopolitan. An amiable feature of the bias is shown in a remarkably mild and indulgent tone when referring to some of the bitterest antagonists of Semmelweis, whatever their misconceptions and errors. We must admit that some obstetric troglodytes disported themselves in the debate of 1875, and there were “to the fore’’ several obstetric mandarins, our equivalents for Soanzoni and Levy and Litzmann and Carl Braun; but due consideration is denied to the school of Simpson which was well represented in the discussion, and better still in the contemporary medical journals available for Hegar’s perusal.

Germany even at that time had no equivalent for the Edinburgh School.

“ How long,” said Hegar, “ antiquated notions are retained, not merely in popular tradition but in the heads of the medical profession, even in those of the leaders of a department of medicine, is very well illustrated by the Transactions of the Obstetrical Society of London in the year 1875. Here we find an olla podrida of etiologicaj opinions, a collection of the newer or quite antiquated views, the last reflected or somewhat modified in a more modern brain. According to some a