Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
III. Life in Vienna
28 NEW ETIOLOGY his whole tenure of office. He was always opposed to reforms in methods of practice and of instruction even before the time of Semmelweis, and denied that he was in any way responsible for the success or failure of his teaching. Such was the man for whom fate found an assistant apparently suitable for the quiet conventional routine hitherto pursued. The aspirant was a young vigorous man of eight-and-twenty, somewhat florid, stout and prematurely bald; he was frank and smiling, with something almost puerile in his address, and at that time he spoke with just a suspicion of a Hungarian brogue. Klein had, of course, noticed Semmelweis as a specially industrious and quiet unobtrusive student, and he readily assented to his nomination to the appointment in the ordinary course of administering his department; but the subordinate and coadjutor was one of the most remarkable men in the medical profession of Europe at the time. He was possessed of that type of intellect which refuses to accept phrase for fact, and ancient conventional formulae and lies for reasoned conclusions. With the kindly sympathies of a strong man and the tender heart of an adult woman, he was to exhibit in due course the most explosive indignation and sarcastic contempt for knaves and fools among students and nurses and midwives, because by their carelessness and levity they endangered the lives of the poor women consigned to their care, and at the same time obstructed the spread of his “Doctrine.” It was largely, as we shall see, to untiring watchfulness and personal example of sacrifice of rest and comfort that Semmelweis owed the remarkable success of his prophylaxis in Vienna and in Buda-Pesth, when want of exacting and constant watchfulness, and lack of conviction, led to complete or comparative failure at most of the lying-in hospitals elsewhere. Foundations of a New Etiology. We are now in a position to understand the circumstances under which the discovery was made and to
