ian was too good a courtier to tell him that it was
only the tuning of the instruments.

To the six propositions in the 142d paragraph, and the remarks about
"specific" diseases, the answer, if any is necessary, seems very simple.
An inflammation of a serous membrane may give rise to secretions which
act as a poison, whether that be a "specific" poison or not, as Dr.
Homer has told his young readers, and as dissectors know too well; and
that poison may produce its symptoms in a few hours after the system has
received it, as any may see in Druitt's "Surgery," if they care to look.
Puerperal peritonitis may produce such a poison, and puerperal women may
be very sensible to its influences, conveyed by contact or exhalation.
Whether this is so or not, 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
e