s a question,--on all
that is most sacred in human life and happiness, that the subject cannot
lose its interest. It is because it seems evident that a fair statement
of the facts must produce its proper influence on a very large
proportion of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds. Individuals may,
here and there, resist the practical bearing of the evidence on their
own feelings or interests; some may fail to see its meaning, as some
persons may be found who cannot tell red from green; but I cannot doubt
that most readers will be satisfied and convinced, to loathing, long
before they have finished the dark obituary calendar laid before them.

I do not know that I shall ever again have so good an opportunity of
being useful as was granted me by the raising of the question which
produced this Essay. For I have abundant evidence that it has made many
practitioners more cautious in their relations with puerperal females,
and I have no doubt it will do so still, if it has a chance of being
read, though it should call out a hundred counterblasts, proving to the
satisfaction of their authors that it proved nothing. And for my part, I
had rather rescue one mother from being poisoned by her attendant, than
claim to have saved forty out of fifty patients to whom I had carried
the disease. Thus, I am willing to avail myself of any hint coming from
without to offer this paper once more to the press. The occasion
has presented itself, as will be seen, in a convenient if not in a
flattering form.

I send this Essay again to the MEDICAL PROFESSION, without the change
of a word or syllable. I find, on reviewing it, that it anticipates and
eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be entertained for a
moment until the one great point of fact is peremptorily settled. In its
very statement of the doctrine maintained it avoids all discussion
of the nature of the disease "known as puerperal fever," and all the
somewhat stale philology of the word contagion. It mentions, fairly
enough, the names of sceptics, or unbelievers as to the reality of
personal transmission; of Dewees, of Tonnelle, of Duges, of Baudelocque,
and others; of course, not including those whose works were then
unwritten or unpublished; nor enumerating all the Continental writers
who, in ignorance of the great mass of evidence accumulated by British
practitioners, could hardly be called well informed on this subject. It
meets all the array of negative cases,--th