Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
CARL BRAUN 297 century : he was now the oldest living of the opponents of Semmelweis and his Lehre, and never had antagonism on a scientific subject been more bitter in its expression and more unfair in its methods, than that of Carl Braun during at least the first ten years of his directorship of the First Obstetric Clinic. Carl Braun could now, in 1881, have afforded to be fair and even generous to Semmelweis, but he appears to have been unable to rise to the occasion. Under the heading of “ dologié des Puerperalfiebers,” after a short historic retrospect, he said: The conveyance (Übertragbarkeit) of an infectious matter has been proved in a large number of cases, and the greatest cleanliness and precaution has been prescribed Semmelweis (1847), Winckel (1869), Spiegelberg (1870) ... Lee (1875) . . .) Pyaemia took the place of infection by cadaveric poison, and the opinions and observations of surgeons upon blood-poisoning from wounds were now accepted as the chief etiological basis of puerperal fever : thus it has come to lose everything characteristic . . . ‘‘According to Semmelweis (1847), and Lange (1862), puerperal fever arises from a blood-disease produced by infection from a decomposed animal matter . . . ‘‘Most gynaecologists of recent times have expressed the opinion that puerperal fever may arise spontaneously, and that it then becomes infectious to healthy women during labour or in childbed, and that the infection may then be spread by foul air penetrating inside the genitals or by the introduction of unclean hands or instruments.” Here, then, is the best that Braun could find it in his heart, even at the last, to say about Semmelweis. He cannot mention any feature of the Lehre for which the world was indebted to Semmelweis alone, without dragging in the name of some writer on the subject who had learned from Semmelweis, even though, like Schröder and Lange, they had gratefully and most explicitly proclaimed their sense of obligation to Semmelweis—Lange fifteen years and Schroeder seven-
