Interpretation of the disease and of the death.—­After confinement, the pus that always naturally forms in the injured parts of the uterus instead of remaining pure becomes contaminated with microscopic organisms from outside, notably the organism in long chains and the pyogenic vibrio.  These organisms pass into the peritoneal cavity through the tubes or by other channels, and some of them into the blood, probably by the lymphatics.  The resorption of the pus, always extremely easy and prompt when it is pure, becomes impossible through the presence of the parasites, whose entrance must be prevented by all possible means from the moment of confinement.

Second observation.—­The fourteenth of March, a woman died of puerperal fever at the Lariboisiere hospital; the abdomen was distended before death.

Pus was found in abundance by a peritoneal puncture and was sowed; so also was blood from a vein in the arm.  The culture of pus yielded the long chains noted in the preceding observation and also the small pyogenic vibrio.  The culture from the blood contained only the long chains.

Third observation.—­The seventeenth of May, 1879, a woman, three days past confinement, was ill, as well as the child she was nursing.  The lochia were full of the pyogenic vibrio and of the organism of furuncles, although there was but a small proportion of the latter.  The milk and the lochia were sowed.  The milk gave the organism in long chains of granules, and the lochia only the pus organism.  The mother died, and there was no autopsy.

On May twenty-eighth, a rabbit was inoculated under the skin of the abdomen with five drops of the preceding culture of the pyogenic vibrio.  The days following an enormous abscess formed which opened spontaneously on the fourth of June.  An abundantly cheesy pus came from it.  About the abscess there was extensive induration.  On the eighth of June, the opening of the abscess was larger, the suppuration active.  Near its border was another abscess, evidently joined with the first, for upon pressing it with the finger, pus flowed freely from the opening in the first abscess.  During the whole of the month of June, the rabbit was sick and the abscesses suppurated, but less and less.  In July they closed; the animal was well.  There could only be felt some nodules under the skin of the abdomen.

What disturbances might not such an organism carry into the body of a parturient woman, after passing into the peritoneum, the lymphatics or the blood through the maternal placenta!  Its presence is much more dangerous than that of the parasite arranged in chains.  Furthermore, its development is always threatening, because, as said in the work already quoted (April, 1878) this organism can be easily recovered from many ordinary waters.

I may add that the organism in long chains, and that arranged in pairs are also extremely widespread, and that one of their habitats is the mucous surfaces of the genital tract. [Footnote:  When, by the procedure I elsewhere described, urine is removed in a pure condition by the urethra from the bladder, if any chance growth occurs through some error of technic, it is the two organisms of which I have been speaking that are almost exclusively present.]