Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VIII. Forerunners and Contemporaries
ITALY 329 systema nervosa.” All which is about as thinkable as “ atmospheric cosmic telluric influences.” There is much quotation of authorities, ancient and modern, in Corradi’s work, and we occasionally get a glimpse of our modern doctrines through a mist of obsolete opinion. Eisenmann’s doctrine of phlogistic and erysipelatous wounds, of which Pouteau of Lyons is said to have been the originator in 1766; and “we ought to mention,” along with Pouteau the aphorism of Hippocrates : “ Mulieri praegnanti erysipelas in utero lethale.” And bringing us a little nearer the doctrine of wound-fever we have a quotation from van Swieten (1765) from the aphorisms of Boerhaave: “Uti in vulnere, ita et in puerperis, illo praecise tempore febricula adest.” What now of the priority of Cruvheilier according to Hegar ? Juncker is described in Corradi’s work as genuinely the first to declare puerperal fever as wound-fever: “ Puerperae tamquam vulneratae merito considerantur.” Then coming to recent times, we find Padovani’s theory of thrombosis as the cause of puerperal fever expounded, and we are assured that the arrest of involution, which we have long recognised as produced by sepsis, was the sole cause of puerperal fever (“Che la metro-paresi sia Velemento generatore quasi exclusivo della febbre puerperale ”). It is not till 1862 that we find Tibone’s references to puerperal fever observed in country districts, just like the observations by English medical practitioners which had been going on then for a century, and had formed the clinical foundation for the doctrine of contagion. And in Italy we also discover “ l’occulto quid divinum,” the “ unknown something,” the “ unbekanntes Etwas,” the elusive entity which left every explanation of the etiology of puerperal fever not perfectly complete. In the whole chapter on Puerperal Fever in the work of Corradi the name of Semmelweis does not once occur.
