thirty
days, at the same time attending several children with smallpox, and yet
was not infected. But seven weeks afterwards she took the disease and
died.

It would seem as if the force of this argument could hardly fail to be
seen, if it were granted that every one of these series of cases were so
reported as to prove that there could have been no transfer of disease.
There is not one of them so reported, in the Lecture or the Letter, as
to prove that the disease may not have been carried by the practitioner.
I strongly suspect that it was so carried in some of these cases, but
from the character of the very imperfect evidence the question can never
be settled without further disclosures.

Although the Letter is, as I have implied, principally 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