may not carry disease, and
death, and bereavement into any one of "his families," as they are
sometimes called.

I will now point out to the young student the mode in which he may
relieve his mind of any confusion, or possibly, if very young, any
doubt, which the perusal of Dr. Meigs's Sixth Letter may have raised in
his mind.

The most prominent ideas of the Letter are, first, that the
transmissible nature of puerperal fever appears improbable, and,
secondly, that it would be very inconvenient to the writer. Dr.
Woodville, Physician to the Small-Pox and Inoculation Hospital in
London, found it improbable, and exceedingly inconvenient to himself,
that cow pox should prevent small-pox; but Dr. Jenner took the liberty
to prove the fact, notwithstanding.

I will first call the young student's attention to the show of negative
facts (exposure without subsequent disease), of which much seems to be
thought. And I may at the same time refer him to Dr. Hodge's Lecture,
where he will find the same kind of facts and reasoning. Let him now
take up Watson's Lectures, the good sense and spirit of which have made
his book a universal favorite, and open to the chapter on Continued
Fever. He will find a paragraph containing the following sentence: "A
man might say, 'I was in the battle of Waterloo, and saw many men around
me fall down and die, and it was said that they were struck down by
musket-balls; but I know better than that, for I was there all the
time, and so were many of my friends, and we were never hit by any
musket-balls. Musket-balls, therefore, could not have been the cause of
the deaths we witnessed.' And if, like contagion, they were not palpable
to the senses, such a person might go on to affirm that no proof existed
of there being any such thing as musket-balls." Now let the student turn
back to the chapter on Hydrophobia in the same volume. He will find that
John Hunter knew a case in which, of twenty-one persons bitten, only one
died of the disease. He will find that one dog at Charenton was bitten
at different times by thirty different mad dogs, and outlived it all.
Is there no such thing, then, as hydrophobia? Would one take no especial
precautions if his wife, about to become a mother, had been bitten by a
rabid animal, because so many escape? Or let him look at "Underwood on
Diseases of Children," [Philadelphia, 1842, p. 244, note.] and he will
find the case of a young woman who was inoculated eight times in