Sinclair, Sir William J.: Semmelweis. His Life and his Doctrine (Manchester, 1909)
VII. Last Illness and Death
274 CARL BRAUN ganate of potash ? . . . Why do we attend to ventilation ? Why do we see to it that bed-linen and utensils are perfectly clean? Why do we isolate infected cases?” We see Späth has now reached the position of a thoroughgoing infectionist. It has been a rapid evolution : he had many doubts a year before. He has made good use of the JEtiologie but he was in Vienna at the time when Hebra first announced the complete discovery of Semmelweis in 1847, and yet in 1864 he seriously declares that the Lehre was originally one-sided, but has undergone modification and development, and in thesEtiologie it has assumed a form which a rational observer can accept. Carl Braun, 1864. In April, 1864, Carl Braun addressed the Vienna Medical Society on the arrangements for heating and ventilation which had been recently introduced into the First Obstetric Clinic. Braun must have felt that the opinions expressed by Späth two months before were in some measure an attack upon himself, and a censure of the unfairness of his methods of controversy over the Semmelweis doctrine. Even now, over sixteen years after the first article by Hebra had appeared in the Vienna Medical Journal, and over three years after the “ JEtiologie . . . .” of Semmelweis had been published to the whole professional world, Carl Braun could not find in his heart the fairness or the generosity to make the slightest concession, openly and publicly, to the theory of puerperal infection, in honour of the man whom he had so persecuted and reviled. As Späth had just publicly declared, all other teachers of midwifery and directors of lying-in hospitals were practically applying the Semmelweis prophylaxis, whatever opinions they may have openly expressed; but Carl Braun held out. In this address to the Medical Society, he proceeds laboriously to prove that health in the lying-in hospital depends chiefly upon ventilation ! “ Pure warm air in sufficient quantity is the most necessary requirement in
