Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VIII. Forerunners and Contemporaries
330 HOLLAND AND DENMARK Holland and Denmark. Midway between the French and German belief in a genius epidemicus as the fundamental etiological factor in puerperal fever and the British doctrine of contagiosity stood a set of vague opinions which could not be clearly enunciated as either one or the other. Such were the rather illogical and even contradictory but practically useful doctrines to which we have had expression from Tilanus, of Amsterdam, in reply to the letter of his pupil Stendrichs announcing the Semmelweis discovery. We have seen that Michaelis, of Kiel, received the tidings from Vienna, just as the English obstetricians and teachers of midwifery in London accepted the Semmelweis Doctrine from Routh, with minds prepared to receive it, and they at once put it into practical application. Levy, of Copenhagen, was a man of a different type. He had not the intellectual acumen of Simpson, of Edinburgh, to appreciate the difference between Semmelweis and the contagionists, even when it was pointed out to him, and when the difference was explained, he had not the candour to admit, like Simpson, that he had been wrong. Levy had just returned from visiting the British lying-in hospitals when he received a copy of the Vienna letter from Michaelis, and he replied that he knew all about the etiology of puerperal fever, even before he heard the name of Semmelweis. Still, in spite of some pedantic objections to the Semmelweis Doctrine, he applied the method of prophylaxis, as did the colleagues at Amsterdam and at Kiel, so that next to Great Britain, Holland and Denmark adopted most frankly in practice the Semmelweis doctrine of conveyed infection as distinguished from contagium. The more the people of Northern Europe were brought into contact with England, considering the traditional similarity of these peoples in their habits of cleanliness, the nearer did professional opinions about many things approach similarity, and in nothing was this more striking than in obstetric science and practice. 1
