Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
CARL BRAUN 275 a lying-in hospital, in order to keep down the number of cases of puerperal fever, to improve the course of the individual cases as they occur, and to diminish the mortality. Ventilation must therefore be considered the cardinal measure of prophylaxis in a lying-in hospital.” The smallness of the mortality is the best criterion of the healthy condition of such an institution, hence we are called upon to admire the effects of the heating and ventilation apparatus, as evidenced by a mortality of 2’9 per cent., i'g per cent, and 2‘2 per cent, in the years 1857 to i860 ! No use was made of the chlorine disinfection as prophylaxis, so what Carl Braun calls the favourable health conditions (die günstigen Sanitätsverhältnisse) of 2 to 3 per cent, mortality are not to be attributed to anything that Semmelweis ever taught. According to Arneth they considered a mortality of 3 per cent, at the Paris Maternité something fairly satisfactory, and we have seen that Skoda referred to 1 per cent, as “ the usual amount,” and an object to be aimed at. Carl Braun says, further, that from 250 to 300 students yearly received practical clinical instruction in midwifery, and half that number practised obstetrical operations upon the cadaver simultaneously. Thus ‘‘practical midwifery,” that is to say, the handling of dead bodies, and clinical midwifery, went on simultaneously to a very large extent, under rather favourable health conditions; only in the winter months the results were less favourable than in the summer time. We have seen what occurred in both Divisions of the Vienna Hospital in 1861, and shall partly repeat the account as an introduction to the later history, and to bring out how little was learned in that institution by experience. There is an English proverb to the effect that experience teaches fools, but surely the most phenomenal fools are those who are not taught by experience. As has been mentioned in October, 1861, puerperal fever broke out suddenly, in the ‘‘epidemic” form, in
