belief that if a ship-load of miscellaneous drugs, with certain very important exceptions,—­drugs, many of which were then often given needlessly and in excess, as then used “could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.”  This was too bad.  The sentence was misquoted, quoted without its qualifying conditions, and frightened some of my worthy professional brethren as much as if I had told them to throw all physic to the dogs.  But for the epigrammatic sting the sentiment would have been unnoticed as a harmless overstatement at the very worst.

Since this lecture was delivered a great and, as I think, beneficial change has taken place in the practice of medicine.  The habit of the English “general practitioner” of making his profit out of the pills and potions he administered was ruinous to professional advancement and the dignity of the physician.  When a half-starving medical man felt that he must give his patient draught and boluses for which he could charge him, he was in a pitiable position and too likely to persuade himself that his drugs were useful to his patient because they were profitable to him.  This practice has prevailed a good deal in America, and was doubtless the source in some measure of the errors I combated.

        Thecontagiousness of puerperal fever.

This Essay was read before a small Association called “The Society for Medical Improvement,” and published in a Medical Journal which lasted but a single year.  It naturally attracted less attention than it would have done if published in such a periodical as the “American Journal of Medical Sciences.”  Still it had its effect, as I have every reason to believe.  I cannot doubt that it has saved the lives of many young mothers by calling attention to the existence and propagation of “Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence,” and laying down rules for taking the necessary precautions against it.  The case has long been decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the time when I wrote two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country opposed my conclusions with all the weight of their experience and position.

This paper was written in a great heat and with passionate indignation.  If I touched it at all I might trim its rhetorical exuberance, but I prefer to leave it all its original strength of expression.  I could not, if I had tried, have disguised the feelings with which I regarded the attempt to put out of sight the frightful facts which I brought forward and the necessary conclusions to which they led.  Of course the whole matter has been looked at in a new point of view since the microbe as a vehicle of contagion has been brought into light, and explained the mechanism of that which was plain enough as a fact to all who were not blind or who did not shut their eyes.

O. W. H.

Beverly Farms, Mass., August 3, 1891