Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
308 OBSTETRICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON Dr. Squire had never met with the alleged febrile condition in lying-in women : he thought the idea was derived from the depths of Dr. Richardson’s inner consciousness, not as the result of bedside experience . . . “While admitting a large class of infections associated with puerperal fever, I hope to show that the whole class of acute specific diseases may be set aside . . . I assert that not only is puerperal fever not typhus, typhoid, smallpox, measles, diphtheria, or even scarlatina, but that these diseases are little modified by the puerperal state . . . . . . When we come to erysipelas the case is very different ... I do not mean to say that puerperal fever is erysipelas . . . but it has a close relation to erysipelas, to hospitalism, to purulent infection, and to suppurating wounds ... I believe we can connect puerperal fever closely with that class of infectious diseases which the investigations of “ Billroth and Lister’’ have enabled us to control. I believe there is danger in those dissecting or dressing surgical wounds attending midwifery cases. Dr. Brunton, a general practitioner, felt called upon to rise and “make a few remarks.” He had dissected, and made postmortem examinations, and gone on with his obstetrical practice all the time, and he had not had in the whole course of his practice a single case of puerperal fever; and then followed a self-contradiction. It was of this class of observer among his opponents that Semmelweis said: “A blind man does not see colours, but that is no proof that colours do not exist.” Dr. Swayne, Physician-Accoucheur to the Bristol General Hospital, referred to a statement which had appeared in the “Times” to the effect that a medical practitioner who has had a case of puerperal fever ought to retire from practice for two or three months, as having created a panic, and he gave an illustration from his own recent experience. As to the mode in which the infection of puerperal fever was conveyed he believed that some men absorbed, and then exhaled the poison, from their skin.
