Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)

IV. Spread of the Doctrine During the Vienna Period

SIMPSON, OF EDINBURGH

73

Spread of Doctrine by Correspondence Resumed.

The letters sent by the friends of Semmelweis to the professors of midwifery in various universities, clinics, and schools for midwifery in the Continent of Europe and Great Britain, received very little response, and the article by Hebra appeared to have attracted no attention from those official teachers whom it ought to have compelled into immediate action. Meanwhile the foreign visitors had all left Vienna to avoid the political revolution.

Simpson.

Among the letters sent to professors of midwifery was one written to Simpson of Edinburgh by Arneth, assistant in the Second Clinic, who knew English better than Semmelweis (der Englischen Sprache mehr mächtig als ich). Simpson was then engrossed in his experiments with chloroform as an anaesthetic, but he replied by return of post to Arneth’s letter : —

“This letter,’’ says Semmelweis, “was filled with abuse (Schmähungen); Simpson said that without the letter he knew in what a lamentable condition midwifery in Germany, and especially in Vienna, still remained : he knew for certain that the cause of the high mortality lay only in the unbounded carelessness with which patients were treated; as, for example, when they put a healthy lying-in woman into the same bed in which another patient had just died, without changing the bedclothes and linen.’’

Our letter also, he said, proved that to us English obstetric literature was quite unknown, otherwise we would have been aware that Englishmen had for a long time held that puerperal fever was a contagious disease, and they employed chlorine disinfection for its prevention. “ This letter,’’ remarks Semmelweis in his usual simple fashion, “did not make us feel disposed to continue the correspondence with Simpson !” It is obvious that Simpson (in Folge