Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)

V. Life in Buda-Pesth

CARL BRAUN

155

says nothing about disinfection, not even about ordinary cleanliness. He had evidently ceased to “wait and wash.”

Where the Semmelweis principles were known and put in practice without faith and without zeal and exactitude the results were in some institutions highly unsatisfactory and were quoted as evidence against the sEtiologie. For example, Retzius of Stockholm lost s'3 Per cent., and Faye of Christiania 15 per cent, about this time. Among those who seized upon these unfortunate incidents as evidence against Semmelweis was naturally Carl Braun, his successor as assistant in the First Clinic. Semmelweis1 remarks on the circumstance in the Stimme. In very large institutions there are many hundreds of patients who are never subjected to examination for purposes of instruction. “ But in an institution where only 150 or 200 births occur annually every case is made use of for purposes of instruction, and in spite of the most excellent arrangements if only one indolent individual is admitte’d among the students an enormous mortality may result.”

Among the witnesses quoted by Carl Braun against the Semmelweis Doctrine in 1855 is Mende of Vienna. “ Mende 2 doubts the correctness of the theory of cadaveric infection, and believes that the cause of the frequency with which puerperal fever occurs in Vienna depends upon the difficulties of ventilation, the crowding of many lying-in women in a small building connected with the General Hospital, and the consequent facility for the production of miasma.” n But,” says Semmelweis, “ Carl Braun knows as well as I do that this state of matters has remained unchanged while the mortality has been reduced, and that the cause of the reduction has been his own fight against cadaveric infection.”

The hostility of Carl Braun was largely personal. After he became assistant to Klein in succession to

1. Aetiologie, p. 426. 2. Aetiologie, p. 526.