Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 55-56. (Budapest, 1970)

TANULMÁNYOK - Benedek, István: The Illness and Death of Semmelweis (angol nyelvű közlemény)

While Semmelweis lived, nobody noticed the alleged wound, and if there was any wound, nobody thought of any causal connection. Not even when the autopsy revealed that Semmelweis had died in pyaemia. The report does indeed mention injuries on the fingers as well as on other parts of the body, but to Markusovszky, who wrote the obituary, it did not occur to draw a comparison with the death of professor Kolletschka, although if anyone then it was Markusovszky whom the parallel ought to have struck. József Fleischer, the assistant of Semmelweis, in his memorial speech seven years later spoke on the circumstances of the death in great detail, he spoke of the pyaemia as "the strange whim of destiny", but he did not mention any operation, or cut, or osteomyelitis, not to say that it might have had a pathogenic effect. Then how did the story of the injury get into the literature? The first such reference was made in the obituary of the Wiener Medizinische Presse (5) according to which the sepsis "was most probably the result of the injury which he had sustained during one of his last operations". This possibility was then confirmed by nobody in Hungary or abroad. It was not further mentioned until 1882 when Alfred Hegar published a short biography on Semmelweis. The Freiburg obstetrician did not know Semmelweis personally, he took most of the data from Vilmos Tauffer, who in turn relied on the account given by Ignác Hirschler, as he himself was not an eyewitness either. Hegar was the first to describe the injury, the infection and the sepsis due to that as a fact; naturally even he does not say that the process had anything to do with the derangement. Immediately after him Jakab Bruck wrote another short biography on Semmelweis(Ü), here the story is already dramatized : "Before the outbreak of his illness he cut the middle finger of his right hand while performing an operation on a newborn infant, this developed into panaratium, later into sepsis." He does not give any account how he got hold of the story of the operation on an infant (which is a rather rare thing, but not impossible after all). After another two decades, at the unveiling ceremony of his statue, in 1906, the nearly seventy year old widow of Semmelweis spoke to the journalists on her husband's death. Among others she said: "When treating a patient he cut the middle finger of his right hand. He got an infection. For long he treated it himself. At nights he kept it in water. Then from this wound he got sepsis in the mental home.

.." From then on the Semmelweis-literature — with some variations but otherwise unanimously — adopted the story of the injury at the operation, which caused pyaemia. There is still another mystery in connection with the statement of the widow. It appeared in the Magyar Hírlap (and in a shortened form in the Budapesti Hírlap, too)(7). The volume of the Magyar Hírlap containing the number in question is missing from the National Széchenyi Library, and in the volume at the Medical University Library somebody had clipped out the article. In a roundabout way I succeeded in getting hold of a copy of the article, made by someone in time. Mrs. Semmelweis said, among others, that before his death her husband had been ill for four years, and according to Rokitanszky, professor of pathological anatomy at Vienna, his myelon had been ill for four years. It is easy to reconstruct from that what Rokitansky thought about the illness.