Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
III. Life in Vienna
ETIOLOGY BEFORE SEMMELWEIS 19 The physiological school,—lucus a non lucendo,—held to a mixture of the lochial and milk theories, which was too ingenious to take any considerable or prolonged hold upon the professional mind. The gastric-bilious fever theory had a considerable vogue in England for a time. Among its advocates was Charles White, of Manchester, and afterwards Denman. The severer cases were for them a putrid fever. Arising about the same time and holding its ground for about a century was the theory that inflammation was the central fact in childbed fever. This school naturally split itself up according to the organ chiefly affected in the opinion of the individual “authority.” It was chiefly metritis or peritonitis or an inflammation of the intestines or even of the omentum. William Hunter and later Baudelocque were perhaps the most prominent and influential advocates of the theory of peritonitis. It was believed by some who accepted peritonitis as the central fact that epidemic and endemic influences complicated the peritonitis with septic metritis and metrophlebitis. About the early middle of the eighteenth century we find the first references to erysipelas as closely associated with puerperal fever. Later, when observations were made which could be explained only on the theory of contagion, as then understood, the belief in the intimate connexion between erysipelas and puerperal fever was almost universally accepted, especially in Great Britain and Ireland. Gordon, of Aberdeen (1795), alleged that puerperal fever was an erysipelas of the bowels and peritoneum. By the middle of the nineteenth century the almost universal belief in England and America was that erysipelas in the puerpera and puerperal fever were identical maladies. It should however always be remembered in judging of the evolution of opinions and of the men who held them, that in England and largely in America the term erysipelas, “ the rose,” was applied to any reddening of the skin in any part of the body in the puerpera. Such appearances, first explained by
