THE ART OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 



of washing the hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before 

 the examination of the patients. As a result of this procedure, 

 the mortality from puerperal fever in the first obstetric clinic of 

 the General Hospital of Vienna fell immediately from 12 per 

 cent to 3 per cent, and later almost to i per cent. His doctrine 

 was well received in some quarters and taken up in some 

 hospitals, but such revolutionary ideas, incriminating the 

 obstetricians as the carriers of death, roused opposition from 

 entrenched authority and the renewal of his position as assistant 

 was refused. He left Vienna and went to Budapest where he 

 again introduced his methods with success. But his doctrine 

 made little headway and was even opposed by so great a man 

 as Virchow. He wrote a book, the famous Etiology, to-day 

 recognised as one of the classics of medical literature; but then 

 he could not sell it. Frustration made him bitter and irascible 

 and he wrote desperate articles denouncing as murderers those 

 who refused to adopt his methods. These met only with ridicule 

 and finally he came to a tragic end in a lunatic asylum in 1865. 

 Mercifully and ironically a few days after entering the asylum 

 he died from an infected wound received in the finger during 

 his last gynaecological operation : a victim of the infection to 

 the prevention of which his whole life had been devoted. His 

 faith that the truth of his doctrine would ultimately prevail 

 was never shaken. In a rather pathetic foreword to his Etiology 

 he wrote : 



" When I look back upon the past, I can only dispel the sad- 

 ness which falls upon me by gazing into that happy future when 

 the infection will be banished. But if it is not vouchsafed to me 

 to look upon that happy time with my own eyes . . . the convic- 

 tion that such a time must inevitably sooner or later arrive will 

 cheer my dying hour." 



The work of others, especially Tamier and Pasteur in 

 France and Lister in England, forced the world reluctantly to 

 recognise, some ten years or more later, that what Semmelweis 

 had taught was correct. 



Semmelweis' failure to convince most people was probably 

 because there was no satisfactory explanation of the value of 

 disinfecting hands until bacteria were shown to be the cause of 

 disease, and probably also because he did not exercise any 



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