SemmelWeis and his predecessors.
نویسنده
چکیده
IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS is generally known for identifying puerperal fever as an infectious disease preventable by aseptic methods. While no-one today would contest the importance, the practicality, or the independence of his contribution, its originality has been disputed from the beginning. When Semmelweis first reported his ideas in Vienna, a veterinarian claimed priority for the discovery.' The first foreign reaction to his work was a vitriolic letter from James Young Simpson of Edinburgh; Simpson complained that if Semmelweis were familiar with British medical literature he would know that the British had long regarded puerperal fever as contagious and preventable by precisely the methods that Semmelweis recommended.2 Since the early decades of the twentieth century there have been intermittent debates concerning the relative priority of Semmelweis and Oliver Wendell Holmes.3 Recently it was claimed that a Finnish physician preceded Semmelweis in his discovery.4 In fact, there is a basic methodological distinction between Semmelweis and all these figures. Semmelweis employed a strategy that was later fundamental to many important developments in medicine; his use of that strategy connects his work with modern medicine and makes him a contributor to our current research tradition in a way that the others simply were not. Semmelweis may not have had a perfect understanding of his own method, and it is possible that the method was anticipated by earlier writers. But recognizing his method is absolutely essential to appreciating his place in the history of medicine, and so far as I can determine, his most important methodological contributions have been totally ignored in the numerous discussions of his work.
منابع مشابه
Ignac Semmelweis (1818-1865) of Budapest and the prevention of puerperal fever.
As a junior obstetrician in Vienna in 1847, Semmelweis discovered the cause of puerperal fever and introduced a method for its prevention. Although his findings were hailed by some as comparable to Jenner's introduction of vaccination, for various reasons his ideas failed to gain general acceptance until after his death.
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Research interests in late nineteenth-century medicine focused heavily on aetiologya subject that one contemporary writer called "the chief science of medicine"., The quest for necessary causes of specific diseases characterized not only research on the infectious diseases but also on psychological disorders and the deficiency diseases.2 In a sense, all of these investigations rested on the ass...
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aIndian Institute of Health Management Research, Jaipur, India. Correspondence to S D Gupta (e-mail: [email protected]) Introduction When I look back upon the past, I can only dispel the sadness which fall upon me by gazing into that happy future when the infection will be banished .... The conviction that such a time must inevitably sooner than later arrive will cheer my dying hour. So wrote I...
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Medical History
دوره 25 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1981