Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
III. Life in Vienna
38 ELIMINATION OF FACTORS conceive how a sense of shame could be an etiological factor in puerperal fever; it could not bring decomposed matter from without nor produce a decomposed matter within the individual herself. Truly, it shows with what want of thought the whole question of the etiology of puerperal fever has been discussed when the persons, who at times are depicted as the most abandoned of the population, have attributed to them in the next sentence a tenderness of modesty such as the upper and highest classes of the community do not claim. Among the upper and even the highest ranks of society labour is conducted by physicians, and their patients do not die of puerperal fever in consequence of wounded modesty in the same proportion as is alleged of the inmates of the lying-in hospitals who, for the sake of argument, are often depicted as the most loose and abandoned of the community. It was not owing to the medical treatment that more patients died in the First Division, because the medical treatment in both divisions was identical. From time to time efforts had been made to obtain better results by transferring all the sick puerperas to the General Hospital, but they succumbed there also under the most varied kinds of medical treatment. In both divisions of the Lying-in Hospital the obstetric treatment was according to the principles of Boer, consequently in hardly any case, except in obvious abnormalities, was an operation of any kind ever resorted to. It was declared that a cause of the mortality in the First Division was that the patients got up too soon after labour. It was usual for them to rise a few hours after the completion of labour, and walk to the beds allotted to them in the lying-in ward, which might be at a considerable distance from the labour-room. Weak patients and operation cases were carried, but the patient after normal labour had to walk. But the arrangements in this respect in the Second Division were exactly the same, except that slightly more inconvenience was caused to
