xamination of the facts; and I confess my surprise, that a professor
who lectures on the Diseases of Women should have ventured to make it.

Nearly seven pages are devoted to showing that I was wrong in saying I
would not be "understood to imply that there exists a doubt in the mind
of any well-informed member of the medical profession as to the fact
that puerperal fever is sometimes communicated from one person to
another, both directly and indirectly." I will devote seven lines to
these seven pages, which seven lines, if I may say it without offence,
are, as it seems to me, six more than are strictly necessary.

The following authors are cited as sceptics by Dr. Meigs: Dewees.--I
cited the same passage. Did not know half the facts. Robert
Lee.--Believes the disease is sometimes communicable by contagion.
Tonnelle, Baudelocque. Both cited by me. Jacquemier.--Published three
years after my Essay. Kiwisch. "Behindhand in knowledge of Puerperal
Fever." [B. & F. Med. Rev. Jan. 1842.] Paul Dubois.--Scanzoni.

These Continental writers not well informed on this point.[See Dr.
Simpson's Remarks at Meeting of Edin. Med. Chir. Soc. (Am. Jour. Oct.
1851.)]

The story of Von Busch is of interest and value, but there is nothing in
it which need perplex the student. It is not pretended that the disease
is always, or even, it may be, in the majority of cases, carried about
by attendants; only that it is so carried in certain cases. That it may
have local and epidemic causes, as well as that depending on personal
transmission, is not disputed. Remember how small-pox often disappears
from a community in spite of its contagious character, and the necessary
exposure of many persons to those suffering from it; in both diseases
contagion is only one of the coefficients of the disease.

I have already spoken of the possibility that Dr. Meigs may have been
the medium of transfer of puerperal fever in some of the cases he has
briefly catalogued. Of Dr. Rutter's cases I do not know how to speak. I
only ask the student to read the facts stated by Dr. Condie, as given
in my Essay, and say whether or not a man should allow his wife to be
attended by a practitioner in whose hands "scarcely a female that has
been delivered for weeks past has escaped an attack," "while no instance
of the disease has occurred in the patients of any other accoucheur
practising in the same district." If I understand Dr. Meigs and Dr.
Hodge, they would not warn the