sed to the vapors of this pitiless disease. Gossiping
friends, wet-nurses, monthly nurses, the practitioner himself, these
are the channels by which, as I suspect, the infection is principally
conveyed."

At a meeting of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, Dr. King
mentioned that some years since a practitioner at Woolwich lost sixteen
patients from puerperal fever in the same year. He was compelled to give
up practice for one or two years, his business being divided among
the neighboring practitioners. No case of puerperal fever occurred
afterwards, neither had any of the neighboring surgeons any cases of
this disease.

At the same meeting Mr. Hutchinson mentioned the occurrence of three
consecutive cases of puerperal fever, followed subsequently by two
others, all in the practice of one accoucheur.[Lancet, May 2, 1840.]

Dr. Lee makes the following statement: "In the last two weeks of
September, 1827, five fatal cases of uterine inflammation came under our
observation. All the individuals so attacked had been attended in labor
by the same midwife, and no example of a febrile or inflammatory disease
of a serious nature occurred during that period among the other patients
of the Westminster General Dispensary, who had been attended by the
other midwives belonging to that institution."

The recurrence of long series of cases like those I have cited, reported
by those most interested to disbelieve in contagion, scattered
along through an interval of half a century, might have been thought
sufficient to satisfy the minds of all inquirers that here was
something more than a singular coincidence. But if, on a more extended
observation, it should be found that the same ominous groups of cases
clustering about individual practitioners were observed in a remote
country, at different times, and in widely separated regions, it would
seem incredible that any should be found too prejudiced or indolent to
accept the solemn truth knelled into their ears by the funeral bells
from both sides of the ocean,--the plain conclusion that the physician
and the disease entered, hand in hand, into the chamber of the
unsuspecting patient.

That such series of cases have been observed in this country, and in
this neighborhood, I proceed to show.

In Dr. Francis's "Notes to Denman's Midwifery," a passage is cited from
Dr. Hosack, in which he refers to certain puerperal cases which proved
fatal to several lying-in women, and in some o