Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
SCHROEDER—SPIEGELBERG 295 done some of his contemporaries and juniors in the United Kingdom. Schroeder, 1871. Among the ablest of the young professors of midwifery of the Franco-German War period was Karl Schroeder, then professor at Erlangen, and afterwards at Berlin. In his Lehrbuch, published in 1871, he wrote : “In the most recent time the opinion supported in this book regarding the origin as depending upon the resorption of septic matter from a wound has been constantly gaining ground ... In fact, the man who carefully peruses the works of Veit and Hirsch, and still doubts the possibility of the production of puerperal fever by the resorption of a decomposed organic matter, such a man is beyond the reach of argument . . . The first who expressed the belief that childbed-fever could sometimes be conveyed by doctors and midwives, who had to handle or deal with cases of puerperal fever, was Denman. Very soon, in England, evidence in support of the manual conveyance (Übertragbarkeit) of the disease was piled up, and a great number of observations were contributed, which went to prove that lying-in women might be infected, not only by women suffering from puerperal fever, but from cases of phlegmonous erysipelas or filthy wounds, through the hands of the practitioner . . . More weighty in its consequences . . . was the discovery of Semmelweis who, everywhere, when there is anything said about the benefactors of the human race, deserves to be placed in the first rank. He first came forward in 1847 with the thoroughly one-sided and insufficient opinion that puerperal fever depended upon cadaveric poison, but he extended his views of his own accord so wide that we now must regard the dominating opinions concerning the etiology of puerperal fever as essentially his own, and the result of his own merit.’’ Spiegelberg, 1874. In 1874, Professor Otto Spiegelberg, of Breslau, gave two lectures on the essential
