Semmelweis, who earlier had shown puerperal fever to be a septicemia, strove to improve conditions in the lying-in wards of Vienna and Budapest. Misunderstood and maligned by many, he eventually published this book in support of his views on the etiology of puerperal sepsis. He had no literary style and his book is difficult reading; it had an overwhelming mass of badly-presented statistics. Sir W. J. Sinclair, his biographer, said of him that “if he could have written like Oliver Wendell Holmes, his ‘Aetiology’ would have conquered Europe in 12 months”. Semmelweis died in an asylum on 13 August 1865. An English translation of the book, by F. P. Murphy, is in Med. Classics, 1941, 5, 350-773. This translation was reprinted with translations of Semmelweis’s other works by Ferenc Gyorgyey, Birmingham, Classics of Medicine Library, 1980. Original edition reprinted, Budapest, 1970. New English translation, somewhat abridged, Madison, Wisc., 1983. Digital facsimile from deutschestextarchiv.de at this link.