Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VI. Publication or "Die Aetiologie"
252 OPEN LETTERS reception of his great work by the professors of midwifery in Germany, and he did not reply by a friendly remonstrance. Still we see in the Open Letter evidence, in the beginning at least, of an effort to remember the friendship of former years, and to spare the opponent who appears to have rather gratuitously thrust himself into the crowd of wilfully ignorant and ill-conditioned antagonists. v. Siebold had written : Always keeping in mind that Semmelweis sees in cadaveric infection the chief cause, nay, the only cause of puerperal fever epidemics . . . though the matter has a good deal in it, and for Vienna in particular has been of great practical value, and there it ought never to be forgotten; still on the theory of cadaveric infection, for the present, judgment has been pronounced : it must be considered exaggerated and too exclusive. ... It is going too far to maintain that this is the only cause of puerperal fever, and thus to explain its frequent occurrence and the malignant character, and the epidemic incidence and extension of the malady in lying-in institutions. Such was the language of a German professor of midwifery and a man of letters used about his friend’s work more than a year after the publication of the Ätiologie, and more than a dozen years after the discovery was first announced in Vienna and published in such a form that it ought at least to have impressed all teachers of midwifery in the German-speaking countries of Europe. And how does the long-suffering friend so gratuitously assailed receive the ignorant and gratuitous attack ? “ Herr Hofrath has made himself responsible for the diffusion of error regarding puerperal fever.............I remember with pleasure the time which we spent together in Vienna. That was at the time when owing to my endeavours the First Obstetric Clinic had ceased to be a State-supported murder-den. I remember with pleasure the time we spent together in Pesth. Pleasant memories are associated in my
