Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 62-63. (Budapest, 1971)
TANULMÁNYOK - Meigs, J. Wister: Kontagionisták, antikontagionisták és a gyermekágyi láz (angol nyelven)
Watson and others to the contrary notwithstanding, Holmes was, in fact, a poet whose message required a villain. No real person was available to fit the part, so the author, with a bit of license, created the imaginary Charles D. Meigs who has come down in history. The factors that made Meigs into a successful choice as History's villain-to-be were complex. My guess is that, on Holmes's side, they were largely unconscious. He had a keen perception of trends in medicine and he found, in Meigs's anthology, the incontrovertible facts about communicability of puerperal fever. Since Meigs did not commit himself on this, (to Holmes) crucial question, the doctor-lawyer part of the poet's being may have impelled him to try to force Meigs into some statement. If Meigs was innocent, surely he would complain about what looked like plagiarism! When Meigs took no direct notice of Holmes for eleven years, perhaps the latter concluded that Meigs must have been as guilty as the poet had imagined him. Then in 1854, the irrational reasons Meigs gave for rejecting contagion confirmed Homes's beliefs. Thereafter he conducted a campaign of "overkill" of Meigs's character. Holmes's skill in making anticontagionism a plausible explanation for persistent puerperal fever contributed to the wide acceptance of that belief, but the belief itself was part of the gods —and —devils game that men have always played. Holmes was able to keep up his attacks because he stopped all medical practice in 1849, and had never had obstetrical experience beyond a few normal deliveries [31], Thus his accurate poetic insights never came into conflict with the ugly realities of rising maternal death rates for contagionists and skeptics alike.* It seems likely that the readiness of later writers on obstetrics to hold anticontagionists responsible for puerperal fever epidemics may have been encouraged by imitation of Holmes's reasoning but more importantly by the lingering need for villians to blame for a fearful hazard that would not go away until the advent of antibiotics. * We would like to add to the author's evaluation of Holmes that undoubtedly Holmes was a poet but that does not exclude the possibility that he was right as a physician, as he was also the professor of anatomy and physiology. Holmes indeed recognized, even before Semmelweis, that puerperal fever was of a contagiouos character which can be transferred from one patient to the other by the physician. In this question he, too, was approaching prevention, the right solution. Newertheless there can be no question of priority between Semmelweis and Holmes, as with Semmelweis prevention was only the logical consequence of the great discovery, that puerperal fever and sepsis are identical. Holmes, on the other hand, did not even touch the problem of aetiology. Meigs and Hodges are not "scapegoats" in the history of medicine but men who retarded with their fatalism not only protection but scientific examination as well. So there is no lack of understanding, false judgement or presupposition of their malevolence with respect to their persons, only the scientific and historical appraisal of their error and their acquiescence in what seemed to them unalterable. (The Editor.)
