92 INFLAMMATION, SUPPURATION, ETC. 



the mortality in Clinique A did not. Commis- 

 sions of inquiry were held, and in vain. It was 

 suggested that the foreign students were somehow 

 to blame, nobody knew why ; and many of them 

 were sent away. Still the deaths went on. Women 

 admitted to Clinique A would go down on their knees 

 and pray to be allowed to go home ; almost every 

 day the bell was heard ringing in the wards, for the 

 administration of the Sacrament to a dying woman. 

 People talked about atmospheric influences, and 

 overcrowding, and the tainted air of old wards, and 

 the power of the mind over the body : and Semmel- 

 weis set to work. 



He observed that cases of protracted labour in 

 Clinique A died, almost all of them ; but not in 

 Clinique B. He observed also that cases of pre- 

 mature labour, nearly all of them, did well, which- 

 ever Clinique they were in ; so did those women 

 who were delivered before they came to the hospital, 

 and were admitted after delivery. He observed 

 also that a row of patients, lying side by side, would 

 all be attacked at once in Clinique A ; which never 

 happened in Clinique B. He tried everything : he 

 altered the details of treatment ; he used various 

 subterfuges to prevent one of the professors from 

 examining serious cases ; he enforced this or that 

 rule in Clinique A, because it was the custom in 

 Clinique B ; he slaved away at the notes of the 

 cases — and at last the truth came to him, by the 

 death of one of his friends from a dissection-wound. 

 He says, " My friend's fatal symptoms unveiled to 

 my mind an identity with those which I had so 



