e errors I combated.

THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER.

This Essay was read before a small Association called "The Society for
Medical Improvement," and published in a Medical Journal which lasted
but a single year. It naturally attracted less attention than it would
have done if published in such a periodical as the "American Journal of
Medical Sciences." Still it had its effect, as I have every reason
to believe. I cannot doubt that it has saved the lives of many young
mothers by calling attention to the existence and propagation of
"Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence," and laying down rules for
taking the necessary precautions against it. The case has long been
decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the time when I wrote
two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country
opposed my conclusions with all the weight of their experience and
position.

This paper was written in a great heat and with passionate indignation.
If I touched it at all I might trim its rhetorical exuberance, but I
prefer to leave it all its original strength of expression. I could not,
if I had tried, have disguised the feelings with which I regarded the
attempt to put out of sight the frightful facts which I brought forward
and the necessary conclusions to which they led. Of course the whole
matter has been looked at in a new point of view since the microbe as
a vehicle of contagion has been brought into light, and explained the
mechanism of that which was plain enough as a fact to all who were not
blind or who did not shut their eyes.

O. W. H.

BEVERLY Farms, Mass., August 3, 1891

HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS

[Two lectures delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge. 1842.]

[When a physician attempts to convince a person, who has fallen into the
Homoeopathic delusion, of the emptiness of its pretensions, he is often
answered by a statement of cases in which its practitioners are thought
to have effected wonderful cures. The main object of the first of these
Lectures is to show, by abundant facts, that such statements, made by
persons unacquainted with the fluctuations of disease and the fallacies
of observation, are to be considered in general as of little or no value
in establishing the truth of a medical doctrine or the utility of a
method of practice.

Those kind friends who suggest to a person suffering from a tedious
complaint, tha