parade their
pretended new science before the unguarded portion of the community; if
they suffer their names to be coupled with it wherever it may gain a
credulous patient; and deny all responsibility for its character, refuse
all argument for its doctrines, allege no palliation for the ignorance
and deception interwoven with every thread of its flimsy tissue, when
they are questioned by those competent to judge and entitled to an
answer?

Such is the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to
trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. A mingled mass
of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of
artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust
the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless imposition.
Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the public,
because it has its journals, its patrons, its apostles, some are weak
enough to suppose it can escape the inevitable doom of utter disgrace and
oblivion. Not many years can pass away before the same curiosity excited
by one of Perkins's Tractors will be awakened at the sight of one of the
Infinitesimal Globules. If it should claim a longer existence, it can
only be by falling into the hands of the sordid wretches who wring their
bread from the cold grasp of disease and death in the hovels of ignorant
poverty.

As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand
years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests of
mankind, always assailed and insulted from without by such as are
ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in
unequal contest with the hundred-armed giant who walks in the noonday,
and sleeps not in the midnight, yet still toiling, not merely for itself
and the present moment, but for the race and the future, I have lifted my
voice against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shapeless bulk into the
path of a noble science it is too weak to strike, or to injure.

THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER

Printed in 1843; reprinted with additions, 1855.

THE POINT AT ISSUE.

THE AFFIRMATIVE.

"The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be
frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses."
O. W. Holmes, 1843.

THE NEGATIVE.

"The result of the whole discussion will, I trust, serve, not only to
exalt your views of the value and dignity of