iable to become involved
and carried back out of the broad stream of philosophical, or, in other
words, truth-loving, investigations. The causes of disease, in the mean
time, have been less earnestly studied in the eagerness of the search
for remedies. Speak softly! Women have been borne out from an old-world
hospital, two in one coffin, that the horrors of their prison-house
might not be known, while the very men who were discussing the treatment
of the disease were stupidly conveying the infection from bed to bed,
as rat-killers carry their poisons from one household to another. Do not
some of you remember that I have had to fight this private-pestilence
question against a scepticism which sneered in the face of a mass of
evidence such as the calm statisticians of the Insurance office could
not listen to without horror and indignation? ["The Contagiousness of
Puerperal Fever."--N. E. Quar. Jour. of Medicine and Surgery, April,
1843. Reprinted, with Additions. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1855.] Have
we forgotten what is told in one of the books published under our own
sanction, that a simple measure of ventilation, proposed by Dr. John
Clark, had saved more than sixteen thousand children's lives in a
single hospital? How long would it have taken small doses of calomel and
rhubarb to save as many children? These may be useful in prudent hands,
but how insignificant compared to the great hygienic conditions! Causes,
causes, and again causes,--more and more we fall back on these as the
chief objects of our attention. The shortest system of medical practice
that I know of is the oldest, but not the worst. It is older than
Hippocrates, older than Chiron the Centaur. Nature taught it to the
first mother when she saw her first-born child putting some ugly pebble
or lurid berry into its mouth. I know not in what language it was
spoken, but I know that in English it would sound thus: Spit it out!

Art can do something more than say this. It can sometimes reach the
pebble or berry after it has been swallowed. But the great thing is
to keep these things out of children's mouths, and as soon as they are
beyond our reach, to be reasonable and patient with Nature, who means
well, but does not like to hurry, and who took nine calendar months,
more or less, to every mother's son among us, before she thought he was
fit to be shown to the public.

Suffer me now to lay down a few propositions, whether old or new it
matters little, not for