Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 55-56. (Budapest, 1970)
TANULMÁNYOK - Benedek, István: The Illness and Death of Semmelweis (angol nyelvű közlemény)
specialist, to disregard the obvious symptoms of insanity? What kind of a "national cause" can make anyone dispute the possibility that a Hungarian scientist, have become insane, when many prominent Hungarians, outstanding politicians, writers, poets, painters and scientists are known to have been mentally ill, and nobody feels shame for the mental disorder of Bolyai, Széchenyi, Munkácsy, Ady or Attila József, just to mention the best known cases. In connection with Semmelweis the Hungarians and indeed the international forums of scientists have much for which they should feel ashemed, but in an entirely different connection. For his insanity he deserves only our sympathy. The revealed symptoms clearly show that Semmelweis had no "toxic delirium" while he was staying in Budapest. The symptoms are not those characteristic of delirium. If we still claim that it was a delirium of a special kind, with symptoms different from the usual, then everything that went around him becomes unintelligible. Did nobody, including himself, notice that he had cut his finger? Did nobody treat him? He was surrounded by physicians, did none of them discover that he was feverish, and ask why? A simple cut does not occasion fever, a simple wound-fever does not cause such fulminant delirious symptoms, consequently if the derangement was caused by the injury, then it had to suppurate, the pus had to spread in the organism, which requires time, and which is an unconcealable process, one causing tormenting pains. A hundred years ago medical science did not stand helpless confronted with festering, it knew a hundred ways for treatment and intervention — why did they do nothing? Then feverish delirium was much better known by the physicians than it is today, as it was much more common : if Semmelweis really had been delirious, it would have been at once recognized and it would not have occured to them to send him to Vienna — why should have they? Could Markusovszky, Balassa, Bókay, Wagner, who were not only his friends but also the pride of Hungarian medicine, commit such a tragic mistake? Is it conceivable that they do not recognize and do not treat a panaritium, a sepsis, a delirium, that they send their friend to Vienna to die there ? It is not conceivable. Panaritium there probably was not, and surely there was no toxic delirium; the consultation met and saw that the case was incurable insanity, which is better to be taken into Vienna: though it cannot be cured even there but it is less embarrassing for the family and for the university than to be present at the long and bitter process of the end. They reckoned on it, "yet we did not expect the blow to come so rapidly", wrote Markusovszky. (4). But if I am wrong, if Semmelweis had toxic delirium, then we should eradicate the names of Balassa, Markusovszky, Bókay from the great Hungarian physicians : they were bunglers, they did not recognize a simple infection. And we should eradicate the names of the outstanding psychiatrists as well: József Pólya, Ferenc Schwartzer, Károly Bolyó, Gyula Niedermann, who could not be entrusted even with the treatment of a simple delirium. (We know the opinion of only one of them: according to Gyula Niedermann Semmelweis had paralysis.) Was there any injury, and if yes, when?
