Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
V. Life in Buda-Pesth
VIRCHOW 165 the passage is interesting as throwing light on the principles taught then by the most prominent professor of midwifery in Europe and director of the largest lying-in hospital in the world. According to Carl Braun puerperal fever is a zymotic disease of an acute character which may be produced owing to strong predisposition in an individual, and also by general injurious influences such as emotional shocks (Gemiithser- schiitterungen) chilling and such like; but as a rule it is produced by special influences through miasma, contagion, decomposed animal matter, whereby the peculiar foreign material acts as a ferment, and by means of contact sets the blood-mass into a state of fermentation.” “ The reader will see with astonishment that Carl Braun who so brilliantly combated the hypothesis of cadaveric infection, who so triumphantly vindicated . . the unlimited power of epidemic influences : that the same Carl Braun now assigns a place in the conception of puerperal fever even to decomposed animal matter not to epidemic influences. Oh, logic.” Virchow. Considering the vast services which Virchow rendered to medical science it would be unbecoming to take the position of a partisan and unduly condemn him for the way in which he acted at the first towards Semmelweis; but it is nevertheless a deplorable incident in the history of midwifery. Virchow was a great pathologist, like Rokitansky : he had no real qualification to speak as an authority on Obstetrics. Perhaps the fact that he was the son-in-law of a professor of midwifery, who founded the Obstetrical Society, gave him a confidence which the amount of his exact knowledge did not justify. It is a pity that Virchow did not take the trouble to learn something of the history and personality of Semmelweis; there must have been some affinity and similarity in temperament between the two men. At the time when Semmelweis was wearing the uniform of the revolutionary Academic Legion in Vienna, Virchow
