Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
220 ETIOLOGY Kingdom. Many pages are devoted to the statistics of the British lying-in hospitals, with some account of the history of each, and of the individual members of the staffs who had written on the subject of puerperal fever. Whenever an illustration is required in order to compare methods and results we are brought back to Vienna or or Paris or Buda-Pesth. There is occasionally a digression of a controversial kind, such as his analysis and apparent annihilation of Litzmann’s1 loose assertions. Semmelweis says: “In order to avoid repetitions I have selected this place in my treatise for an exposition of these circumstances, although I am speaking of other things for the moment.” This is an unnecessary explanation : the digressions without obvious justification are so frequent, and repetitions occur everywhere. After the chiefly statistical account of British lying-in hospitals, Semmelweis, making free use of Arneth’s work, proceeds with a highly instructive compilation of English experience regarding the incidence of puerperal fever outside the lying-in hospitals owing to the conveyance of a decomposed material. This consists of purely clinical observations by general practitioners of medicine, a thing unheard of in Continental Europe. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards with increasing volume such evidence brought English obstetricians to the conviction that puerperal was the work of a contagion, an entity which with proper precautions could be destroyed. Between the generally accepted Continental theory of a genius epidemicus, whose logical result was laisser faire, and the British theory of contagion there was all the practical difference between apathetic fatalism on the one hand, and strenuous hopeful and largely successful exertion on the other. Arneth commences the portion of his work on which Semmelweis eagerly lays hold, as the only matter available for his purpose in Europe, with the observations 1. Das Kindbettfieber in nosologische^ geschichtlicher und therapeutischer Beziehung, Halle, 1844.
