Pictures from the Past of the Healing Arts / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 18-19. (Budapest, 2000)

Semmelweis's Birthplace - the Home of the Museum

rather backward at these times, we have to refuse the rumour — spread both in Hungary and abroad — that Semmelweis was practically uneducated. Another interesting data, which should be also emphasized, is that in the official certificates the nationality of both Ignác and his brothers was marked as Hungarian (hungarus), whereas the nationality of non-Hungarians were usually marked as German, Croatian, Greek etc. After he had finished gymnasium he studied at a two-year's course of philosophy at the Pest University. Complying with his father's wishes who insisted that he should become a military judge, Semmelweis enrolled as a law student in the University of Vienna in 1837. But he soon changed his mind and began his studies at the faculty of medicine. After one year in the University of Vienna Semmelweis came back to Pest, where he attended the university for two years. Then he returned again to Vienna and finished his studies there. He took his degree in 1844 and wrote his M.D. thesis on botany, entitled Tractatus de Vita Plantarum. In the same year he obtained his master's degree in midwifery and was graduated in surgery as well. Semmelweis stayed in Vienna at a time when the Vienna School of Medicine reached its full development. The internist Skoda and the pathologist Rokitansky had not yet risen to eminence and lectured only in private courses, but they enjoyed tremendous popularity among medical students, including certainly Semmelweis. Rokitansky did not accept the views of the Old School. He denied that pathology had but a secondary role by corroborating or at the best by correcting the results of internists. He followed Bicha?s experiments, and enriched pathology with the aspects of patho-physiology. Semmelweis was greatly affected by the influence of Skoda, the reformer of diagnostics in internal medicine and his colleague Hebra, who put forward a new classification of skin diseases founded on pathological observations. Their effect on Semmelweis appeared both in his medical training, his erudition and his passion for researching and the methodology of his investigations. The New Vienna School was characterized by the predominance of the new trend of pathology. They could give such answers which would never had been maintained on the basis of the examination of a living body. The collaboration of Skoda, the internist, and Rokitansky, the pathologist could show whether the internal diagnosis was right and made the control of pathological observations possible in the living organism. Semmelweis had to choose obstetrics instead of internal medicine, since Professor Skoda could not offer him the post of an assistant in his medical clinic. Thus he applied for the assistant's vacant post in Professor Klein's, Obstetric Clinic. He had to wait for two years until he was appointed, first as temporary then as regular assistant in 1846. But during these two years he had also carried on his regular autopsy work with Rokitansky and attended the lectures of Skoda, too. Lajos Markusovszky, the other outstanding Hungarian representative of medicine, also stayed in Vienna at that time (between 1845 and 1847) as a scholarship holder. They made lifelong friendship, and Markusovszky was an ardent supporter of Semmelweis and encouraged and inspired him in all his life. 17