Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
V. Life in Buda-Pesth
IÓ2 CARL BRAUN they are taught with regard to prophylaxis is shewn by the 12 per cent, mortality in 1852. “Thus it is that infectors are trained for different towns, villages and country districts, and for various classes of Society.” Besides it is difficult or impossible to obtain statistics of private practice on account of the universal adoption of euphemisms for fatal puerperal processes such as nervous fever, typhus, etc.; and in Austria it is forbidden by law to certify such diseases as puerperal fever and carcinoma in women as the immediate cause of death. An example of controversial method on both sides occurs in the discussion of the mortality in certain foreign lying-in hospitals. Carl Braun has said that the favourable results obtained in English lying-in hospitals depend upon the fact that only married women are admitted to such hospitals in England, whereas in France and Germany only unmarried women are admitted to lying-in hospitals. “The reasons for the better results in England,” says Semmelweis, “we have fully explained, but we never imagined that our prophylaxis was defective because we did not prescribe marriage as a protection against puerperal fever.” We next find quoted a long summary of Carl Braun’s explanation of the worse results in his department as compared with the School for Midwives, in overcrowding, difficulties of ventilation, admission of a worse class of cases; anything rather than the admission that the hypothesis of cadaveric infection was worthy of serious consideration. Semmelweis seizes every point and answers in great detail, with dates and statistics, and many pages are devoted to matter which was of little except personal interest then, and can be of no value from any point of view to the modern English-speaking reader. They only illustrate once more the earnestness, patience and devotion of the man as the apostle of his doctrine. The repeated re-statement and exposition of the complete import of the Doctrine should have made any misunderstanding impossible; yet we shall find more
