ABSTRACT

After attempting unsuccessfully to renew his assignment as Johannes Klein's assistant, Ignaz Semmelweis petitioned the Viennese authorities to be appointed docent of obstetrics. In October 1849, two months after Semmelweis concluded his animal experiments, Josef Skoda delivered a lecture on Semmelweis's work. Two obstetricians from the University of Prague, Wilhelm Friedrich Scanzoni and Bernhard Seyfert, responded to Skoda. They were outraged by his suggestion that childbed fever in their clinic was due to their own carelessness and denied that cadaverous poisoning was causing puerperal fever at their facility. On 15 May 1850, seven months after Skoda's lecture, Semmelweis finally presented his findings before the Imperial Viennese Society of Physicians. In his lecture, Semmelweis claimed that every case of childbed fever—without a single exception—occurred when decaying organic matter was resorbed into the living tissues of maternity patients. Semmelweis defined "childbed fever" as "a resorption fever determined through the resorption of decaying animal-organic matter".