possibility have known the half or the tenth of the facts bearing on the subject which have reached such a frightful amount within the last few years?  Again, as to the utility of negative facts, as we may briefly call them,—­instances, namely, in which exposure has not been followed by disease,—­although, like other truths, they may be worth knowing, I do not see that they are like to shed any important light upon the subject before us.  Every such instance requires a good deal of circumstantial explanation before it can be accepted.  It is not enough that a practitioner should have had a single case of puerperal fever not followed by others.  It must be known whether he attended others while this case was in progress, whether he went directly from one chamber to others, whether he took any, and what precautions.  It is important to know that several women were exposed to infection derived from the patient, so that allowance may be made for want of predisposition.  Now if of negative facts so sifted there could be accumulated a hundred for every one plain instance of communication here recorded, I trust it need not be said that we are bound to guard and watch over the hundredth tenant of our fold, though the ninety and nine may be sure of escaping the wolf at its entrance.  If any one is disposed, then, to take a hundred instances of lives endangered or sacrificed out of those I have mentioned, and make it reasonably clear that within a similar time and compass ten thousand escaped the same exposure, I shall thank him for his industry, but I must be permitted to hold to my own practical conclusions, and beg him to adopt or at least to examine them also.  Children that walk in calico before open fires are not always burned to death; the instances to the contrary may be worth recording; but by no means if they are to be used as arguments against woollen frocks and high fenders.

I am not sure that this paper will escape another remark which it might be wished were founded in justice.  It may be said that the facts are too generally known and acknowledged to require any formal argument or exposition, that there is nothing new in the positions advanced, and no need of laying additional statements before the Profession.  But on turning to two works, one almost universally, and the other extensively appealed to as authority in this country, I see ample reason to overlook this objection.  In the last edition of Dewees’s Treatise on the “Diseases of Females,” it is expressly said, “In this country, under no circumstance that puerperal fever has appeared hitherto, does it afford the slightest ground for the belief that it is contagious.”  In the “Philadelphia Practice of Midwifery” not one word can be found in the chapter devoted to this disease which would lead the reader to suspect that the idea of contagion had ever been entertained.  It seems proper, therefore, to remind those who are in the habit of referring to these works for guidance, that there may possibly be some sources of danger they have slighted or omitted, quite as important as a trifling irregularity of diet, or a confined state of the bowels, and that whatever confidence a physician may have in his own mode of treatment, his services are of questionable value whenever he carries the bane as well as the antidote about his person.