In the earliest and embryonic stage of professional development, any violent impression on the instructor’s mind is apt to be followed by some lasting effect on that of the pupil.  No mother’s mark is more permanent than the mental naevi and moles, and excrescences, and mutilations, that students carry with them out of the lecture-room, if once the teeming intellect which nourishes theirs has been scared from its propriety by any misshapen fantasy.  Even an impatient or petulant expression, which to a philosopher would be a mere index of the low state of amiability of the speaker at the moment of its utterance, may pass into the young mind as an element of its future constitution, to injure its temper or corrupt its judgment.  It is a duty, therefore, which we owe to this younger class of students, to clear any important truth which may have been rendered questionable in their minds by such language, or any truth-teller against whom they may have been prejudiced by hasty epithets, from the impressions such words have left.  Until this is done, they are not ready for the question, where there is a question, for them to decide.  Even if we ourselves are the subjects of the prejudice, there seems to be no impropriety in showing that this prejudice is local or personal, and not an acknowledged conviction with the public at large.  It may be necessary to break through our usual habits of reserve to do this, but this is the fault of the position in which others have placed us.

Two widely-known and highly-esteemed practitioners, Professors in two of the largest Medical Schools of the Union, teaching the branch of art which includes the Diseases of Women, and therefore speaking with authority; addressing in their lectures and printed publications large numbers of young men, many of them in the tenderest immaturity of knowledge, have recently taken ground in a formal way against the doctrine maintained in this paper: 

On the Non-Contagious Character of Puerperal Fever:  An Introductory Lecture.  By Hugh L. Hodge, M. D., Professor of Obstetrics in the University of Pennsylvania.  Delivered Monday, October 11, 1852.  Philadelphia, 1852.

On the Nature, Signs, and Treatment of Childbed Fevers:  in a Series of Letters addressed to the Students of his Class.  By Charles D. Meigs, M. D., Professor of Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children in Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, etc., etc.  Philadelphia, 1854.  Letter vi.

The first of the two publications, Dr. Hodge’s Lecture, while its theoretical considerations and negative experiences do not seem to me to require any further notice than such as lay ready for them in my Essay written long before, is, I am pleased to say, unobjectionable in tone and language, and may be read without offence.