[Sebald Brugmans and hospital gangrene].

Abstract

Sebald Justinus Brugmans, Professor at Leyden University and from 1795 on Director of the 'Geneeskundig Bureau der Bataafsche Republiek', organized all necessary facilities in the Leyden Military Hospital. His appointment, 1811, as inspector-general of the French Imperial Military Health-Service, seemed to be the next step in a brilliant career of more than 25 years. He became a leading expert in the fight against hospital-gangrene and its prevention, not in the least because of the enthusiastic reception of his treatise on gangrene (1814) in which he meticulously analyzed and explained the causes of this dreadful disease. He completed his entry with a thorough evaluation of all possible and well experienced sanitary regulations. He was convinced of the contagious character of the disease. Quite unusual at the time, he used the terms "miasma" and "contagium" interchangeably. Maybe partly for that reason, his work was instrumental in convincing most later authors that gangrene was a contagious disease. Brugmans' fame was established forever after tha Battle of Waterloo (June 1815).