, facts alone can determine, and to facts we
have had recourse to settle it.

The following statement is made by Dr. Meigs in his 142d paragraph, and
developed more at length, with rhetorical amplifications, in the 134th.
"No human being, save a pregnant or parturient woman, is susceptible to
the poison." This statement is wholly incorrect, as I am sorry to have
to point out to a Teacher in Dr. Meigs's position. I do not object to the
erudition which quotes Willis and Fernelius, the last of whom was
pleasantly said to have "preserved the dregs of the Arabs in the honey of
his Latinity." But I could wish that more modern authorities had not
been overlooked. On this point, for instance, among the numerous facts
disproving the statement, the "American Journal of Medical Sciences,"
published not far from his lecture-room, would have presented him with a
respectable catalog of such cases. Thus he might refer to Mr. Storrs's
paper "On the Contagious Effects of Puerperal Fever on the Male Subject;
or on Persons not Childbearing" (Jan. 1846), or to Dr. Reid's case
(April, 1846), or to Dr. Barron's statement of the children's dying of
peritonitis in an epidemic of puerperal fever at the Philadelphia
Hospital (Oct. 1842), or to various instances cited in Dr. Kneeland's
article (April, 186). Or, if he would have referred to the "New York
Journal," he might have seen Prof. Austin Flint's cases. Or, if he had
honored my Essay so far, he might have found striking instances of the
same kind in the first of the new series of cases there reported and
elsewhere. I do not see the bearing of his proposition, if it were true.
But it is one of those assertions that fall in a moment before a slight
examination of the facts; and I confess my surprise, that a professor who
lectures on the Diseases of Women should have ventured to make it.

Nearly seven pages are devoted to showing that I was wrong in saying I
would not be "understood to imply that there exists a doubt in the mind
of any well-informed member of the medical profession as to the fact that
puerperal fever is sometimes communicated from one person to another,
both directly and indirectly." I will devote seven lines to these seven
pages, which seven lines, if I may say it without offence, are, as it
seems to me, six more than are strictly necessary.

The following authors are cited as sceptics by Dr. Meigs: Dewees.--I
cited the same passage. Did not know half the facts. Robert
Lee.