Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
296 CARL BRAUN elements of puerperal fever (Uber das Wesen des Puerperalfiebers). We shall meet with these lectures again in connection with Waldeyer’s contributions to bacteriology; we must glance at them now from the clinical standpoint. “Who was the carrier : whence came the disease, why was the progress so rapid ? Perhaps a miasma ! That cannot be : a miasma behaves differently. Gentlemen, I can tell you : the carrier of the infection was the attendants, the bringer an accidentally infected puerpera . . . They were wont to seek the origin of the disease in the corrupted atmosphere, in want of cleanliness, and that was at first the conventional service of defending the infection theory rendered by the English and, among Germans, by the much-abused Semmelweis. In the clearest manner these causes were expounded and followed in all their consequences by Hirsch, Veit, and v. Winckel.” We have often wondered on what principles writers on puerperal fever have selected their authorities. Why should Spiegelberg have selected Hirsch, Veit, and Winckel ? Able and accomplished men all of them, but what did they accomplish in improving upon the Lehre of Semmelweis ? It required neither extending nor mending at the hands of any man. It was complete, “totus teres rotundus,” as it came from its creator within the Vienna period; and although in the course of time scientific research has thrown light on the reason for the success of the prophylaxis, the experience of every decade only adds to the conviction that Semmelweis alone completed the Lehre on its clinical side in every phase and form of it, and gave practical proof to the whole world how life could be saved by it. Carl Braun, i881. In preparation for the publication of a second edition of his Lehrbuch, in 1881, Carl Braun was compelled to give expression to the opinions which he had come to form on the theory of infection. It was a task that could not be shirked. He had by this time occupied the chair of midwfifery in Vienna for a quarter of a
