I intend no breach of courtesy, but this is a proper place to warn the student against skimming the prefaces and introductions of works for mottoes and embellishments to his thesis.  He cannot learn anatomy by thrusting an exploring needle into the body.  He will be very liable to misquote his author’s meaning while he is picking off his outside sentences.  He may make as great a blunder as that simple prince who praised the conductor of his orchestra for the piece just before the overture; the musician was too good a courtier to tell him that it was only the tuning of the instruments.

To the six propositions in the 142d paragraph, and the remarks about “specific” diseases, the answer, if any is necessary, seems very simple.  An inflammation of a serous membrane may give rise to secretions which act as a poison, whether that be a “specific” poison or not, as Dr. Homer has told his young readers, and as dissectors know too well; and that poison may produce its symptoms in a few hours after the system has received it, as any may see in Druitt’s “Surgery,” if they care to look.  Puerperal peritonitis may produce such a poison, and puerperal women may be very sensible to its influences, conveyed by contact or exhalation.  Whether this is so or not, facts alone can determine, and to facts we have had recourse to settle it.

The following statement is made by Dr. Meigs in his 142d paragraph, and developed more at length, with rhetorical amplifications, in the 134th.  “No human being, save a pregnant or parturient woman, is susceptible to the poison.”  This statement is wholly incorrect, as I am sorry to have to point out to a Teacher in Dr. Meigs’s position.  I do not object to the erudition which quotes Willis and Fernelius, the last of whom was pleasantly said to have “preserved the dregs of the Arabs in the honey of his Latinity.”  But I could wish that more modern authorities had not been overlooked.  On this point, for instance, among the numerous facts disproving the statement, the “American Journal of Medical Sciences,” published not far from his lecture-room, would have presented him with a respectable catalog of such cases.  Thus he might refer to Mr. Storrs’s paper “On the Contagious Effects of Puerperal Fever on the Male Subject; or on Persons not Childbearing” (Jan. 1846), or to Dr. Reid’s case (April, 1846), or to Dr. Barron’s statement of the children’s dying of peritonitis in an epidemic of puerperal fever at the Philadelphia Hospital (Oct. 1842), or to various instances cited in Dr. Kneeland’s article (April, 186).  Or, if he would have referred to the “New York Journal,” he might have seen Prof.  Austin Flint’s cases.  Or, if he had honored my Essay so far, he might have found striking instances of the same kind in the first of the new series of cases there reported and elsewhere.  I do not see the bearing of his proposition, if it were true.  But it is one of those assertions that fall in a moment before a slight examination of the facts; and I confess my surprise, that a professor who lectures on the Diseases of Women should have ventured to make it.