The very first sentence in the section about the response from the medical community: > One of the first to respond to Semmelweis's 1848 communications was Jam

The very first sentence in the section about the response from the medical community: > One of the first to respond to Semmelweis's 1848 communications was James Young Simpson who wrote a stinging letter. Simpson surmised that the English obstetrical literature must be totally unknown in Vienna, or Semmelweis would have known that the English had long regarded childbed fever as contagious and would have employed chlorine washing to protect against it. And: > Indeed, initial responses to Semmelweis's findings were that he had said nothing new. But: > In fact, Semmelweis was warning against all decaying organic matter, not just against a specific contagion that originated from victims of childbed fever themselves. This misunderstanding, and others like it, occurred partly because Semmelweis's work was known only through secondhand reports written by his colleagues and students. At this crucial stage, Semmelweis himself had published nothing. Why didn't he publish until later? Who knows. The fact is, he didn't and it hurt his case. And, if you read further, you see that Semmelweis simply went crazy later on, with people later on proposing causes from Alzheimer's to learned helplessness to PTSD. Not a good thing if you are insulting and argumentative to begin with and are proposing a new theory on top of it.