Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 66-68. (Budapest, 1973)

FORUM - Semmelweis kórtörténetének nyomában — Bécs és Budapest levelezése (magyar, angol és német nyelven)

III. ISTVÁN DARVAS: THE SEMMELWEIS PROBLEM Magyar Nőorvosok Lapja (Journal of Hungarian Gynaecologists) 30. 1967. PP. 392-394 "... summing up what we have said and on the basis of what we have said so far, it is undoubtedly well justified to give this paper the title 'The Semmelweis problem'. There are many experts who take up a position on this question even after one hundred years and do so necesserily without knowing the basic documents in which his attending physicians and the hospital he was treated in declare their own diagnoses and observations. These documents did not crop up despite every attempt to find them and there are already opinions according to which these papers have never existed at all. The monography of professor Haranghy and his colleagues announces as follows : (cf. p. 14.) ' ... It is known that the clinical case history of Semmelweis disappeared without any trace. The search carried out by Tibor Győry, Felix Boenheim, Joseph Keller and myself proved uneffective similarly to the attempts of other medical historians. Asked by professor Haranghy, Chiari, professor of pathological anatomy in Vienna tried to find the case history too, without any success.' The same negative result was manifested in the information of the Institute of Medical History of the Vienna University (Institut für Geschichte der Medizin der Universität Wien) dating back to July, 8th I960 which runs as follows: 'Though we were aware of the fact that the original copy of Ignác Semmelweis's case history and protocol have been lost, we nevertheless looked for them most carefully anew. Unfortunately, we could not find anything'. Thinking of the research of Sticker mentioned above and concluding with absolutely no success which he carried out six decades before and again on the similar misfortunate attempts of Schürer v. Waldheim the best known biographer of Semmelweis, my suspicion increased that the irretrievable loss of the documents is the result of some common action, moreover, the result of a carefully designed organization. Putting all my power and the necessary shrewdness into the scale, I kept on searching for a whole year from scent to scent into the suspected direction. I seemed to find the right track and the traces became more and more suspicious until I was absolutely sure—thank to the slip of a tongue where I went for information, for which one must have been seriously punished I am sure, that the documents do exist in perfect condition, they have always been and they are preserved in safe custody, though everybody denies it. The documents of the consultation of the three physicians exist, i.e. the report of professors Balassa, Bókay and Wagner on their diagnosis and proposal. There exists a special declaration of Bókay throwing light upon the period before the illness broke out. In the same manner all the case histories of the well defined mental hospital referring to Semmelweis do exist in perfect condition. I succeeded in learning some details of the content of the records. I can already