is objection. In the last edition of Dewees's Treatise on the
"Diseases of Females," it is expressly said, "In this country, under no
circumstance that puerperal fever has appeared hitherto, does it afford
the slightest ground for the belief that it is contagious." In the
"Philadelphia Practice of Midwifery" not one word can be found in the
chapter devoted to this disease which would lead the reader to suspect
that the idea of contagion had ever been entertained. It seems proper,
therefore, to remind those who are in the habit of referring to these
works for guidance, that there may possibly be some sources of danger
they have slighted or omitted, quite as important as a trifling
irregularity of diet, or a confined state of the bowels, and that
whatever confidence a physician may have in his own mode of treatment,
his services are of questionable value whenever he carries the bane as
well as the antidote about his person.

The practical point to be illustrated is the following:

The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be
frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses.

Let me begin by throwing out certain incidental questions, which,
without being absolutely essential, would render the subject more
complicated, and by making such concessions and assumptions as may be
fairly supposed to be without the pale of discussion.

1. It is granted that all the forms of what is called puerperal fever
may not be, and probably are not, equally contagious or infectious. I
do not enter into the distinctions which have been drawn by authors,
because the facts do not appear to me sufficient to establish any
absolute line of demarcation between such forms as may be propagated by
contagion and those which are never so propagated. This general result I
shall only support by the authority of Dr. Ramsbotham, who gives, as the
result of his experience, that the same symptoms belong to what he calls
the infectious and the sporadic forms of the disease, and the opinion
of Armstrong in his original Essay. If others can show any such
distinction, I leave it to them to do it. But there are cases enough
that show the prevalence of the disease among the patients of a single
practitioner when it was in no degree epidemic, in the proper sense
of the term. I may refer to those of Mr. Roberton and of Dr. Peirson,
hereafter to be cited, as examples.

2. I shall not enter into any dispute about the particul