our profession, but to
divest your minds of the overpowering dread that you can ever become,
especially to woman, under the extremely interesting circumstances of
gestation and parturition, the minister of evil; that you can ever
convey, in any possible manner, a horrible virus, so destructive in its
effects, and so mysterious in its operations as that attributed to
puerperal fever."--Professor Hodge, 1852.

"I prefer to attribute them to accident, or Providence, of which I can
form a conception, rather than to a contagion of which I cannot form any
clear idea, at least as to this particular malady."--Professor Meigs,
1852.

" . . . in the propagation of which they have no more to do, than with
the propagation of cholera from Jessore to San Francisco, and from
Mauritius to St. Petersburg."--Professor Meigs, 1854.

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"I arrived at that certainty in the matter, that I could venture to
foretell what women would be affected with the disease, upon hearing by
what midwife they were to be delivered, or by what nurse they were to be
attended, during their lying-in; and, almost in every instance, my
prediction was verified."--Gordon, 1795.

"A certain number of deaths is caused every year by the contagion of
puerperal fever, communicated by the nurses and medical attendants."
Farr, in Fifth Annual Report of Registrar-General of England, 1843.

". . . boards of health, if such exist, or, without them, the medical
institutions of a country, should have the power of coercing, or of
inflicting some kind of punishment on those who recklessly go from cases
of puerperal fevers to parturient or puerperal females, without using due
precaution; and who, having been shown the risk, criminally encounter it,
and convey pestilence and death to the persons they are employed to aid
in the most interesting and suffering period of female existence."
--Copland's Medical Dictionary, Art. Puerperal States and Diseases, 1852.

"We conceive it unnecessary to go into detail to prove the contagious
nature of this disease, as there are few, if any, American practitioners
who do not believe in this doctrine."--Dr. Lee, in Additions to Article
last cited.

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[INTRODUCTORY NOTE.] It happened, some years ago, that a discussion arose
in a Medical Society of which I was a member, involving the subject of a
certain supposed cause of disease, about which something was known, a
good deal s