Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
CARL BRAUN 237 in the course of digital examination was not to be thought of, for every occasion to soil the hands with such substances was avoided with the most anxious care. The first germs of pestilence must therefore be declared to be the product of some unknown epidemic influence ... in its later developments it bore distinctly the stamp of an endemic. . . . There can be no doubt of the existence here of a miasma, or rather of a contagium generating itself within the limits of the institution. . . . Other lying-in institutions were spared, and no trace of puerperal fever in private practice at the same time could be discovered. In order to eradicate the disease from the institution, the Second Obstetric Clinic, every means of disinfection was employed in vain . . . the institution must be closed. This last measure is the only radical cure, it is the best of antimiasmatics. . . . It is best to arrange for the patients to be confined at their own homes, and brought into the hospital 24 or 48 hours after, according to the analogy of the Gassengeburten which, as is well-known, are very seldom followed by puerperal illness. This from the same Zipfel who, for the sake of an immediate argumentative advantage, declared in 1850 that street-births were as often followed by fatal illness as any. Carl Braun. There was a good deal more to record about the morbidity and mortality of childbed fever in the Vienna Lying in Hospital in 1861, besides what was contained in the Report of Professor Zipfel. Between the results in Buda-Pesth and Vienna in this year there was a dramatic contrast. As we have seen, the University Lying-in Hospital of Pesth had been removed to new quarters in i860, better but still very defective quarters. In the school- year 1860-61 Semmelweis did not have a single case of puerperal fever to record. In Carl Braun’s Clinic in Vienna, on the other hand, a frightful pseudoepidemic raged in the autumn; within forty-five days 113 patients sickened and 48 of them died.
