happened), and still more from
all diseases put together, that the conclusion is irresistible that
a most fearful morbid poison is often generated in the course of this
disease. Whether or not it is sui generis, confined to this disease, or
produced in some others, as, for instance, erysipelas, I need, not stop
to inquire.

In connection with this may be taken the following statement of Dr.
Rigby. "That the discharges from a patient under puerperal fever are in
the highest degree contagious we have abundant evidence in the history
of lying-in hospitals. The puerperal abscesses are also contagious, and
may be communicated to healthy lying-in women by washing with the same
sponge; this fact has been repeatedly proved in the Vienna Hospital; but
they are equally communicable to women not pregnant; on more than
one occasion the women engaged in washing the soiled bed-linen of the
General Lying-in Hospital have been attacked with abscess in the fingers
or hands, attended with rapidly spreading inflammation of the cellular
tissue."

Now add to all this the undisputed fact, that within the walls of
lying-in hospitals there is often generated a miasm, palpable as the
chlorine used to destroy it, tenacious so as in some cases almost to
defy extirpation, deadly in some institutions as the plague; which has
killed women in a private hospital of London so fast that they were
buried two in one coffin to conceal its horrors; which enabled Tonnelle
to record two hundred and twenty-two autopsies at the Maternite of
Paris; which has led Dr. Lee to express his deliberate conviction that
the loss of life occasioned by these institutions completely defeats the
objects of their founders; and out of this train of cumulative evidence,
the multiplied groups of cases clustering about individuals, the deadly
results of autopsies, the inoculation by fluids from the living patient,
the murderous poison of hospitals,--does there not result a conclusion
that laughs all sophistry to scorn, and renders all argument an insult?

I have had occasion to mention some instances in which there was an
apparent relation between puerperal fever and erysipelas. The length
to which this paper has extended does not allow me to enter into the
consideration of this most important subject. I will only say, that
the evidence appears to me altogether satisfactory that some most fatal
series of puerperal fever have been produced by an infection originating
in the ma