Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
OBSTETRICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON 31Í septic matter with lesions of continuity in the generative track, such as exist in every parturient woman.” It is obvious from further remarks that Dr. Playfair had not yet quite shaken off the contagionist faith in the influence of zymotic disease as a factor in producing and modifying puerperal fever, but his opinions otherwise were evidently derived from the Edinburgh School. Dr. Tilt said if the zymotic influence is to have ascribed to it such an extraordinary effect in the production of puerperal fever, scarcely a puerperal woman in London could escape ... If too much importance has been attached to zymotic influence . . . too little has been attached to the autogenesis of puerperal fever. ‘T think that if a woman be sometimes poisoned by others, she more frequently poisons herself.” Dr. Fordyce Barker had come from New York specially for the debate in order to press his well-known peculiar opinions about puerperal fever once more upon the attention of the medical profession. After much verbiage he said : “I will now give my reasons for believing that there is a disease which may be properly called ‘‘puerperal fever” . . . the disease is an essential fever peculiar to puerperal women, as much a distinct disease as typhus or typhoid.” Among the propositions which have a sort of interest in the history of medical error there is the following : ‘‘The clinical phenomena of puerperal fever are quite different from those which are met with in surgical septicaemia or pyaemia.” Dr. Charles West, speaking of microscopic organisms as a factor in the production of puerperal fever, ‘‘we have not as yet a sufficient amount of knowledge on the subject to be able to apply it, or to draw from the observations that have already been made any correct and useful inference.” He did not see that we have advanced far, if at all, beyond the conclusions which Dr. Ferguson laid down, that the phenomena of puerperal fever depend upon a vitiated state of the fluids, and that in the case of a woman in the puerperal state, such vitiated state of the fluids is specially apt to arise . . .
