Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
IV. Spread of the Doctrine During the Vienna Period
68 HEBRA’S FIRST ARTICLE midwifery, they were ordered to use the bodies of the mothers and the dead infants for purposes of instruction instead of the phantom. It was this dangerous, senseless, and disgusting practice which Beér refused to comply with, and this refusal was made the pretext for depriving him of his position as professor of midwifery and director of the lying-in hospital. Klein, his successor, obeyed, as we have seen, and gave “epidemic” puerperal fever such an established position in the hospital that it could never be displaced. It was because this extreme practice of making postmortem examinations was not generally known in Europe, that the ready objection to the Semmelweis doctrine was raised in many quarters; cadaveric poison could not be the cause of puerperal fever, because their students did not dissect or make post-mortem examinations. Still the practice of post-mortem examination by the professors of midwifery and their assistants was almost universal in the lying-in hospitals of Europe, with the exception of Great Britain and Ireland. Spread of the Doctrine by Correspondence. Whatever may be pleaded in extenuation of the silence of Semmelweis, there can be no question that the time had now arrived when he himself should have enforced the announcement made on his behalf by his friend Hebra. The columns of the Austrian, Hungarian, and German medical journals were available to him for publication, and it was now, and not ten years later, that he was in duty bound to seize the opportunity of proclaiming his Doctrine. But he remained practically silent, and he and a group of young friends, chiefly foreign graduates who had been attracted to Vienna by the opportunities of clinical study, resorted to the comparatively futile methods of spoken word and private letter in order to spread the doctrine. Among these visitors were Dr. F. H. C. Routh, of London, Dr. Stendrichs of Amsterdam, Kussmaul oi Heidelberg, a former assistant of the now venerable
