ly taken up with
secondary and collateral questions, and might therefore be set aside as
in the main irrelevant, I am willing, for the student's sake, to touch
some of these questions briefly, as an illustration of its logical
character.

The first thing to be done, as I thought when I wrote my Essay, was to
throw out all discussions of the word contagion, and this I did
effectually by the careful wording of my statement of the subject to be
discussed. My object was not to settle the etymology or definition of a
word, but to show that women had often died in childbed, poisoned in some
way by their medical attendants. On the other point, I, at least, have
no controversy with anybody, and I think the student will do well to
avoid it in this connection. If I must define my position, however, as
well as the term in question, I am contented with Worcester's definition;
provided always this avowal do not open another side controversy on the
merits of his Dictionary, which Dr. Meigs has not cited, as compared with
Webster's, which he has.

I cannot see the propriety of insisting that all the laws of the eruptive
fevers must necessarily hold true of this peculiar disease of puerperal
women. If there were any such propriety, the laws of the eruptive fevers
must at least be stated correctly. It is not true, for instance, as Dr.
Meigs states, that contagion is "no respecter of persons;" that "it
attacks all individuals alike." To give one example: Dr. Gregory, of the
Small-Pox Hospital, who ought to know, says that persons pass through
life apparently insensible to or unsusceptible of the small-pox virus,
and that the same persons do not take the vaccine disease.

As to the short time of incubation, of which so much is made, we have no
right to decide beforehand whether it shall be long or short, in the
cases we are considering. A dissection wound may produce symptoms of
poisoning in six hours; the bite of a rabid animal may take as many
months.

After the student has read the case in Dr. Meigs's 136th paragraph, and
the following one, in which he exclaims against the idea of contagion,
because the patient, delivered on the 26th of December, was attacked in
twenty-four hours, and died on the third day, let him read what happened
at the "Black Assizes" of 1577 and 1750. In the first case, six hundred
persons sickened the same night of the exposure, and three hundred more
in three days. [Elliotson's Practice, p. 298.] Of those a