d often fatal effects which have followed from
wounds received in the post-mortem examination of patients who have died
of puerperal fever. The fact that such wounds are attended with peculiar
risk has been long noticed. I find that Chaussier was in the habit of
cautioning his students against the danger to which they were exposed in
these dissections. [Stein, L'Art d'Accoucher, 1794; Dict. des Sciences
Medicales, art. "Puerperal."] The head pharmacien of the Hotel Dieu, in
his analysis of the fluid effused in puerperal peritonitis, says that
practitioners are convinced of its deleterious qualities, and that it is
very dangerous to apply it to the denuded skin. [Journal de Pharmacie,
January, 1836.] Sir Benjamin Brodie speaks of it as being well known
that the inoculation of lymph or pus from the peritoneum of a puerperal
patient is often attended with dangerous and even fatal symptoms. Three
cases in confirmation of this statement, two of them fatal, have been
reported to this Society within a few months.

Of about fifty cases of injuries of this kind, of various degrees of
severity, which I have collected from different sources, at least twelve
were instances of infection from puerperal peritonitis. Some of the
others are so stated as to render it probable that they may have been of
the same nature. Five other cases were of peritoneal inflammation;
three in males. Three were what was called enteritis, in one instance
complicated with erysipelas; but it is well known that this term has
been often used to signify inflammation of the peritoneum covering the
intestines. On the other hand, no case of typhus or typhoid fever is
mentioned as giving rise to dangerous consequences, with the exception
of the single instance of an undertaker mentioned by Mr. Travers, who
seems to have been poisoned by a fluid which exuded from the body.
The other accidents were produced by dissection, or some other mode of
contact with bodies of patients who had died of various affections.
They also differed much in severity, the cases of puerperal origin being
among the most formidable and fatal. Now a moment's reflection will
show that the number of cases of serious consequences ensuing from the
dissection of the bodies of those who had perished of puerperal fever
is so vastly disproportioned to the relatively small number of autopsies
made in this complaint as compared with typhus or pneumonia (from which
last disease not one case of poisoning