e divided between
the parties. The balance must be struck boldly and the result declared
plainly. If I have been hasty, presumptuous, ill-informed, illogical; if
my array of facts means nothing; if there is no reason for any caution in
the view of these facts; let me be told so on such authority that I must
believe it, and I will be silent henceforth, recognizing that my mind is
in a state of disorganization. If the doctrine I have maintained is a
mournful truth; if to disbelieve it, and to practise on this disbelief,
and to teach others so to disbelieve and practise, is to carry
desolation, and to charter others to carry it, into confiding families,
let it be proclaimed as plainly what is to be thought of the teachings of
those who sneer at the alleged dangers, and scout the very idea of
precaution. Let it be remembered that persons are nothing in this
matter; better that twenty pamphleteers should be silenced, or as many
professors unseated, than that one mother's life should be taken. There
is no quarrel here between men, but there is deadly incompatibility and
exterminating warfare between doctrines. Coincidences meaning nothing,
though a man have a monopoly of the disease for weeks or months; or cause
and effect, the cause being in some way connected with the person; this
is the question. If I am wrong, let me be put down by such a rebuke as
no rash declaimer has received since there has been a public opinion in
the medical profession of America; if I am right, let doctrines which
lead to professional homicide be no longer taught from the chairs of
those two great Institutions. Indifference will not do here; our
Journalists and Committees have no right to take up their pages with
minute anatomy and tediously detailed cases, while it is a question
whether or not the "blackdeath" of child-bed is to be scattered broadcast
by the agency of the mother's friend and adviser. Let the men who mould
opinions look to it; if there is any voluntary blindness, any interested
oversight, any culpable negligence, even, in such a matter, and the facts
shall reach the public ear; the pestilence-carrier of the lying-in
chamber must look to God for pardon, for man will never forgive him.

THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER.

In collecting, enforcing, and adding to the evidence accumulated upon
this most serious subject, I would not be understood to imply that there
exists a doubt in the mind of any well-informed member of th