Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
III. Life in Vienna
ELIMINATION OF FACTORS 35 mortality in the Second Division remained remarkably lower than that of the First. Whatever the cause of this difference in mortality it was clearly not owing to the relative degree of overcrowding in the two divisions. We next find a long series of statistical tables bearing on this question of overcrowding (JEtiol, p. 13 et seq.). Table III., IV., V., VI., VII., etc., up to Table XIII., p. 31, all illustrate the question of overcrowding, and demonstrate that there was no sort of relationship between the number of patients confined within the Division and the mortality. When the births were at the fewest the number of deaths in proportion did not diminish. With diminution in the degree of overcrowding there was no corresponding diminution in the mortality. This is shewn month by month in detail during the seven years 1841—1847. When we compare month by month, for 76 months tabulated, the relative mortality and mark its relative diminution, we see nothing in the mortality corresponding to the relative decrease in the number of births, and no relation in the larger or smaller mortality to the amount of overcrowding. Well might Fritsch speak of the annihilating force of the statistics of Semmelweis. An opinion prevailed that the very building in which so many thousands of women had gone through parturition and the puerperium, had been attacked with puerperal fever and had died, must be so pestilential that it was not to be wondered at if puerperal fever got the upper hand and was perennial. If that were really the cause of puerperal fever then the Second Division ought to have had a higher mortality than the First, because even in Boer’s time frightful epidemics had raged in what is now the Second Division, and this before even the foundations of the First Division had been laid. The evil reputation of the institution was such that the women admitted entered it with fear, and that dread was declared to be a cause why the patients sickened and died. “That they were afraid of the First Division there
