Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
2l8 ETIOLOGY English practitioners, starting with the conviction that puerperal fever is contagious, do not visit a healthy pregnant, parturient or puerperal woman when they have paid a visit to an infected pregnant, parturient or puerperal patient, without previously disinfecting their hands with chlorine disinfectant and without changing their clothes; and when the number of puerperal fever cases increases in their practice, they go away from home or completely abandon midwifery practice for a time. The English practitioner, if he must undertake the postmortem examination of a patient who has died from puerperal fever, never visits a normal parturient or puerperal woman without first pushing the same precautions to the fullest extent. In every case in which the infected puerpera produces a decomposed material, the English practitioners do something which is superfluous but not harmful; they destroy the decomposed material in the belief that they are destroying a contagium which would cause puerperal fever if carried to a healthy parturient or puerperal woman. After the postmortem examination of a patient who has died of puerperal fever, they take similar precautions with the object of destroying the contagium, that is, the decomposed material with which their hands have been rendered unclean. German and French practitioners, believing that puerperal fever is not contagious, and not knowing that the malady may be conveyed by means of a decomposed material, take part in performing post-mortem examinations of women who have died from puerperal fever, and they visit puerperal fever cases even when these are producing a decomposed matter, and then without any antiseptic precautions they at once visit healthy parturient and puerperal women. In this way they carry to their patients decomposed matter which when absorbed causes puerperal fever. In English lying-in hospitals therefore all those cases which depend upon contact with the puerperal cadaver
