Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
III. Life in Vienna
FRIENDS OF SEMMELWEIS 27 new position. The future great diagnostician, who was not well off, accepted the post of police surgeon. But Skoda had some powerful friends, and better times were dawning upon the Vienna Medical School. In 1840 a special department for Diseases of the Chest was formed in the General Hospital, and Skoda was placed in charge of it in spite of the opposition of his old enemies. Next year Skoda was also put in charge of the new division for Diseases of the Skin, with Ferdinand Hebra, a young man of five-and-twenty, as his assistant. Thus was founded the department of Dermatology for which the Vienna School of Medicine ultimately became so famous. To these three men was largely owing the rapid growth in fame and fortune of the Vienna School. Semmelweis was a diligent student of all the subjects taught by these ardent medical reformers, and especially of pathological anatomy. He had also to attend the lectures of Professor Klein, who appears to have been a dull man and a poor teacher. From him Semmelweis was destined to suffer much more than from tedious discourses. Klein had been, as we have seen, an assistant to Lucas Johann Boer, the greatest obstetrician of his time. Boer himself had been made professor by the great reforming Emperor Joseph II. in 1789, and had maintained English methods of midwifery practice to the end of his official life as a teacher. Boer was detested by the reactionaries and clerics who acquired enormous influence in Vienna after the fall of Napoleon. Courtiers and clerics had constantly tried for years to put favourites of their own in the place of Boer, and they were too impatient to wait for his resignation or death; so, on the pretext of insubordination because he refused to teach midwives on the cadaver instead of the phantom, they deposed him and put Klein in his chair. This was in 1822. We have seen that in the last year of Boer’s directorship of the lying-in division of the hospital the mortality from puerperal fever was 0^84 per cent.; in Klein’s first year it was 7‘8 per cent., and it remained more or less high during
