Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
III. Life in Vienna
36 ELIMINATION OF FACTORS was abundant evidence. Many heart-rending scenes occurred when patients found out that they had entered the First Division by mistake. They knelt down, wrung their hands and begged that they might be discharged. Lying-in patients with uncountable pulse, meteoric abdomen, and dry tongue, only a few hours before their death, would protest that they were really quite well, in order to avoid medical treatment, for they believed that the doctor’s interference was always the precursor of death. In spite of all this I could not convince myself that fear was in any measure a factor in producing the great mortality in the First Division, because as physician I could not see how fear, a psychic condition, could produce such anatomical changes as those seen in puerperal fever. Besides it must have taken a long time of raised mortality before it could become an impression among the people that the death-rate in one division was persistently very much higher than in the other. Fear does not explain the beginning of the mortality (“ Durch die Furcht wird der Beginn der Sterblickeit nicht erklärt ”). Certain religious observances were also accused of increasing the mortality. The chapel of the lying-in hospital was so situated that the priests, bearing the last sacrament to the dying, could in the Second Division reach the ward where the patient lay without passing through the other rooms, but in the First Division they must pass through five wards before reaching the sick-room beyond, It was usual for the priests, arrayed in their robes, with an attendant marching before them ringing a bell according to Catholic ritual, to proceed to the sick woman to administer the sacrament. According to ordinary arrangement this should be done only once in 24 hours, but in childbed fever 24 hours is a long time, and the priests had to be sent for occasionally in a few hours after their regular visit. It is easy to imagine the impression which the fateful tolling of the bell would produce upon the lying-in women. “Even to me myself
