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

VIII. Forerunners and Contemporaries

326

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

of fitting him to teach in his own turn on returning home.”

Crantz returned to Vienna in 1754, and set to work to raise the standard of midwivery among the midwives, and to make a beginning with the teaching of midwifery to medical students and surgeons. Crantz wrote much for the training of midwives, and we have seen what an important position the School for Midwives occupied in the General Hospital at a later time. We have here one more illustration of the elevation of the midwife and the relative degradation of the doctor—all in contrast with the system which had long become established in England.

In Hungary as was to be expected on the verge of the barbarous East, medical education in all its forms was for long at a low ebb, but there was an awakening early in the 18th century. How slow was the evolution of the Science and Art of Obstetrics we have seen indicated in the arrangements of the Clinic at Buda-Pesth when Semmelweis was professor. In his class of midwifery at one time he had 68 medical students, paying no attention because midwifery was not a compulsory subject for the degree examination, and 199 midwife-pupils who could not quite understand the ill-developed technical terms, and perhaps the teacher’s particular dialect, of the Hungarian language.

As indicating the state of midwifery practice in Hungary in the last half of the 18th century, v. Siebold quotes a dialogue between the Emperor Joseph II., for whom there was nothing too great or too small if it affected the welfare of his subjects, and the Hungarian teacher of midwifery, Werzpremi, who had been a pupil of Smellie.

To the question of the Emperor, “ Exercesne tu quoque hic illam artem, et quo successu ? Wefzpremi replied, giving expression to the usual pretext of wounded modesty : Fatendum est ingenue, Augustissime D. me rarius ad parturientes vocari, ita enim sunt pudicae mulierculae nostrae, ut mares non facile admit-