Although the Letter is, as I have implied, principally taken up with secondary and collateral questions, and might therefore be set aside as in the main irrelevant, I am willing, for the student’s sake, to touch some of these questions briefly, as an illustration of its logical character.

The first thing to be done, as I thought when I wrote my Essay, was to throw out all discussions of the word contagion, and this I did effectually by the careful wording of my statement of the subject to be discussed.  My object was not to settle the etymology or definition of a word, but to show that women had often died in childbed, poisoned in some way by their medical attendants.  On the other point, I, at least, have no controversy with anybody, and I think the student will do well to avoid it in this connection.  If I must define my position, however, as well as the term in question, I am contented with Worcester’s definition; provided always this avowal do not open another side controversy on the merits of his Dictionary, which Dr. Meigs has not cited, as compared with Webster’s, which he has.

I cannot see the propriety of insisting that all the laws of the eruptive fevers must necessarily hold true of this peculiar disease of puerperal women.  If there were any such propriety, the laws of the eruptive fevers must at least be stated correctly.  It is not true, for instance, as Dr. Meigs states, that contagion is “no respecter of persons;” that “it attacks all individuals alike.”  To give one example:  Dr. Gregory, of the Small-Pox Hospital, who ought to know, says that persons pass through life apparently insensible to or unsusceptible of the small-pox virus, and that the same persons do not take the vaccine disease.

As to the short time of incubation, of which so much is made, we have no right to decide beforehand whether it shall be long or short, in the cases we are considering.  A dissection wound may produce symptoms of poisoning in six hours; the bite of a rabid animal may take as many months.

After the student has read the case in Dr. Meigs’s 136th paragraph, and the following one, in which he exclaims against the idea of contagion, because the patient, delivered on the 26th of December, was attacked in twenty-four hours, and died on the third day, let him read what happened at the “Black Assizes” of 1577 and 1750.  In the first case, six hundred persons sickened the same night of the exposure, and three hundred more in three days. [Elliotson’s Practice, p. 298.] Of those attacked in the latter year, the exposure being on the 11th of May, Alderman Lambert died on the 13th, Under-Sheriff Cox on the 14th, and many of note before the 20th.  But these are old stories.  Let the student listen then to Dr. Gerhard, whose reputation as a cautious observer he may be supposed to know.  “The nurse was shaving a man, who died in a few hours after his entrance; he inhaled his breath, which had a nauseous taste, and in an hour afterwards was taken with nausea,