Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
III. Life in Vienna
ELIMINATION OF FACTORS 43 labour and immediately afterwards. They had to walk to the hospital in all states of the weather, often ill-clad and ill-shod. What was it that protected these women from the unknown injurious endemic influences at work in the First Clinic? At the Second Clinic the health of the lying-in women after street-birth was just as favourable as in the First Clinic; that this did not attract much attention was simply because of the usually more favourable health conditions of the patients generally in the Second Division. “ This would be the place for demonstrating by statistics the smaller death-rate among the cases of Gassengeburt compared with the First Clinic as a whole.” “ So long as I had the notes of the cases attended at the First Clinic at my disposal I did not feel the need of a table of statistics of street-births, for no one denied the facts, and consequently I delayed preparing statistical tables. Later when I had ceased to be assistant, they began to deny the facts, just as they afterwards refused to admit that there had ever been any difference in the mortality of the two Clinics, a difference which is undeniably established by my Table I.” When Skoda moved for the appointmentof a committee of professors to inquire and prepare statistics, including a table to show the comparative results in cases of street- birth, Klein protested, and the committee, already nominated auf höheren Befehl, never met. Klein in fact obtained the interference of the Minister of Education to prevent investigation. Another class of cases in which puerperal sickening was remarkably rare was that of premature labours. Women who were prematurely confined were exposed not only to the endemic influences of the First Division but to the additional danger resulting from the cause of the premature labour. Whence then the smaller incidence of abnormal puerperal processes among these cases in the First Division?
