At a meeting of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society Dr. King. mentioned that some years since a practitioner at Woolwich lost sixteen patients from puerperal fever in the same year.  He was compelled to give up practice for one or two years, his business being divided among the neighboring practitioners.  No case of puerperal fever occurred afterwards, neither had any of the neighboring surgeons any cases of this disease.

At the same meeting Mr. Hutchinson mentioned the occurrence of three consecutive cases of puerperal fever, followed subsequently by two others, all in the practice of one accoucheur. [Footnote:  Lancet, May 3, 1840.] Dr. Lee makes the following statement:  “In the last two weeks of September, 1827, five fatal cases of uterine inflammation came under our observation.  All the individuals so attacked had been attended in labor by the same midwife, and no example of a febrile or inflammatory disease of a serious nature occurred during that period among the other patients of the Westminster General Dispensary, who had been attended by the other midwives belonging to that institution.” [Footnote:  Lond.  Cyc. of Pract.  Med., art., “Fever, Puerperal”]

The recurrence of long series of cases like those I have cited, reported by those most interested to disbelieve in contagion, scattered along through an interval of half a century, might have been thought sufficient to satisfy the minds of all inquirers that here was something more than a singular coincidence.  But if, on a more extended observation, it should be found that the same ominous groups of cases clusterings about individual practitioners were observed in a remote country, at different times, and in widely separated regions, it would seem incredible that any should be found too prejudiced or indolent to accept the solemn truth knelled into their ears by the funeral bells from both sides of the ocean—­the plain conclusion that the physician and the disease entered, hand in hand, into the chamber of the unsuspecting patient.

That such series of cases have been observed in this country, and in this neighborhood, I proceed to show.

In Dr. Francis’s “Notes to Denman’s Midwifery” a passage is cited from Dr. Hosack in which he refers to certain puerperal cases which proved fatal to several lying-in women, and in some of which the disease was supposed to be conveyed by the accoucheurs themselves. [Footnote:  Denman’s Midwifery, p. 673, third Am. ed.]

A writer in the “New York Medical and Physical Journal” for October, 1829, in speaking of the occurrence of puerperal fever confined to one man’s practice, remarks:  “We have known cases of this kind occur, though rarely, in New York.”

I mention these little hints about the occurrence of such cases partly because they are the first I have met with in American medical literature, but more especially because they serve to remind us that behind the fearful array of published facts there lies a dark list of similar events, unwritten in the records of science, but long remembered by many a desolated fireside.