Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
II. Parentage and Nationality
PARENTAGE AND NATIONALITY 7 Hospital, in reference to the Vienna period of the career of Semmelweis. He also draws largely upon the work of Bruck. These monographs and others, especially that of v. Waldheim, together with much literary material more or less relevant, as well as some personal reminiscences of hospital work in Vienna, are laid under contribution for the purposes of this treatise. II. Parentage and Nationality. Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis was born about the middle of July 1818, at Ofen or Buda, which Western Europe now recognises as a portion of the great city of Buda- Pesth, the capital of Hungary. He was the fourth son among eight children born into the family. His father was a commercial man or shopkeeper in a good way of business, and his mother was Theresa Miiller, daughter of a man in a corresponding social and commercial position. Since Semmelweis ended his life of suffering and persecution, mainly at the hands of German university professors, and acquired a world-wide celebrity of which any nation might be proud, attempts have been made to claim him as of German nationality, and even specifically as Austrian. The claim is absurd; and it has been completely disposed of in recent years by Tiberius von Gydry* in his criticism of v. Waldheim’s biography. Semmelweis was Hungarian in everything but name. The history of Hungary tells of German colonies planted for generations throughout the length and breadth of the land from Pressburg to Transylvania in the attempts to Germanise Hungary. Instead of becoming German, Hungary largely assimilated the foreign element, and one of the most prosperous of the assimilated colonies was that of Ofen or Buda, the site of a Semmelweis : “ Berliner klin. Wochenschrift,” 1905, No. 33.
