Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 81. (Budapest, 1977)
TANULMÁNYOK - Ehrentheil, O. F.: Oliver Wendell Holmes és Semmelweis Jgnác egy és negyed századról visszatekintve (angol nyelven)
Holmes answered these charges by reprinting his essay with additional cases to support his views. To Hodge's criticisms he pointed to the accumulated evidence. Meigs had attacked him personally but Holmes did not wish to lower himself to a level unworthy of his profession. He answered all the points of Meigs's discussion with sharp logical arguments and with wit. : 1) Holmes refused to go into an ethymologic discussion of the word contagion because what he had meant in the essay he had expressed quite clearly, namely that the hand or the clothes of the attending medical persons are often transmitting the disease to previously non-sick parturient women. 2) To the reasoning that a physician may treat a case of P.F. and not transmit the disease, Holmes pointed out that even of people exposed to variola not everyone catches this disease. Holmes quoted the following argument from the then famous Watson's lectures: [15] A man might say, "I was in the battle of Waterloo and saw many men around me fall and die, and it was said that they were struck down by musket balls; but I know better than that, for I was there all the time, and so were many of my friends, and we never were hit by any musket balls. Musket balls therefore, could not have been the cause of the deaths we witnessed.'''' And if , like contagion, they were not palpable to the senses, such a person might go on to affirm that no proof existed of there being any such thing as musket balls. 3) In regard to the length of the incubation period Holmes pointed to the known fact that the incubation times are quite different in various diseases. Furthermore, one has to adjust the theories to the facts and not the facts to preconceived ideas. Holmes had friends in the Harvard Medical School Faculty who shared his opinion e.g. : John Jackson, professor of surgery and Walter Channing, professor of obstetrics. The opposition of Hodge and Meigs may have drawn the attention of wider circles of physicians to this field and prompted the reprinting of Holmes' essay. P. Clark noted 100 years later that these two obstetricians are now remembered chiefly for their opposition to the proof of the contagiousness of puerperal fever. They actually aided rather than hindered the advance of knowledge. [16] Interestingly the controversy between Holmes and Charles Delucene Meigs was recently joined by the greatgreatgrandson of C. D. Meigs namely J. Wister Meigs, M.D. This descendents' paper [17a] begins with the statement that his ancestor was wrong, wrong, wrong in his denial of the transmissibility of P.F. but in the further argumentation this article pointed out that C. D. Meigs was not quite the black sinner as usually depicted in medical writing. The greatgreatgrandson made the point that people who were opposed to the idea of the transmissibility of P.F. rejected the basic concept for psychological reasons rather than from rational skepticism. They wanted no part of contagionism because it made their practice emotionally intolerable. [17b] Furthermore the descendant of C. D. Meigs expressed the following (in my opinion unwarranted) belief: (literal quote)
