Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VIII. Forerunners and Contemporaries
GERMANY 323 In a country where the ablest men in the capital could obtain no opportunities of prolonged and exact clinical observation of the individual case, and the provincial practitioners had no independent midwifery practice at all, it was hardly to be expected that any progress would be made towards solving the supremely difficult problem of the etiology of puerperal fever. Dubois at the time of the revolution of 1848 had no more real knowledge of the subject than had Ambrose Páré in the time of Henry II. Germany. In Germany the state of midwifery teaching and practice in the 18th century was even worse than it had been in France. Men were not permitted to attend women in labour. Was not an enterprising doctor burnt at the stake in Hamburg in the century before for attending in disguise a case of labour ? There was no instruction for midwives except by oral tradition from old women to young—old wives’ fables. Owing largely to the paralysing effects of the Thirty Years War, Germany did not participate in the progress made in France. Medical men were still excluded from obstetric practice, except when requested by midwives in extreme emergencies, and hence it arose that the surgeon was associated in the popular mind only with obstetric atrocities and cruelties. So there was added to the excluding influence of alleged modesty, popular fear and aversion. Medical men gradually began to give instruction to midwives, but the teaching was purely theoretical and had to be conveyed by the simple reading of manuals, and this custom held its sway till well into the 19th eentury. It will be remembered that one of the counts against Boer of Vienna was that he refused to be tied down to the reading of an official manual to his students. He must assert the right to draw upon his own knowledge. There was no lying-in hospital anywhere in the country; the French, on the other hand, had the maternity portion of the Hotel Dieu since 1664.
