Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
314 HEGAR chill, or emotional excitement, is still capable of causing febris puerperalis, or at least of representing the chief etiological factor. The body of the puerpera is loaded with matters which must be expelled. If anything hurtful in any way intervenes, which in another person would remain absolutely innocuous, if a feverish condition arises from any other cause whatever, then the mine explodes. In the trembling equilibrium in which the blood and fluids exist, it requires only some disturber of any sort, and the devil is let loose. Even a quite spontaneous origin of the malady is possible, if it occurs that the tissue elements, which are absorbed during the involution of the uterus, are not eliminated with sufficient rapidity. Barnes has expounded this doctrine in more detail so late as 1882 in the American Journal of Obstetrics. In these Transactions we find it taught that the poison of scarlet fever conveyed to a puerpera causes in that person febris puerperalis, and, when carried from this individual to another, produces characteristic scarlatina. “ Septicaemia may result from an injury without any infection being conveyed, merely because the person affected is in an unsatisfactory state of health. Even all infectiousness of febris puerperalis is denied. A few of the speakers even held firmly to the belief that puerperal fever is an essential fever which can affect only women in the lying-in state.” “Whoever will take the trouble to look through these Transactions, a thing which I would not however recommend, will find other remarkable things of a similar sort. I have called attention to those mentioned in order to show in what confusion (Wirr sal) the doctrine of puerperal fever still remains beyond the Channel. “ It has been generally believed that what Semmelweis taught had been known for a long time in England. Nowr I believe that no one who knows the Transactions of the Obstetrical Society, and also what was formerly produced in England concerning the relations of the specific infectious diseases to puerperal fever, and the
