When
it was {406} reduced to five per cent, the hospital authorities felt
quite self-complacent about it. Shortly after the beginning of the
second quarter of the nineteenth century, there began to come
glimmerings of the real cause of the affection. It was not due to
something from within the patient, but was caused by a _materies
morbi_ introduced from without. Usually the physician in attendance
was responsible for the introduction of it. He came to these patients
after contact with septic cases of various kinds improperly cleansed.
The consequence was that he infected them, and puerperal fever was
contracted.

It would seem as though the medical profession would be very ready and
willing to test any such simple explanation of the origin of a serious
disease, and if possible secure its diminution. On the contrary, the
old men proved to be so wedded to the notion that the physician could
not possibly be the cause of this serious condition, that they were
very bitter in their denunciation of those who tried to introduce the
new idea. One distinguished old professor of midwifery declared very
superciliously that, of course, it was a very charming thing for a
young poet to insist on the notion that these serious diseases were
not associated necessarily with the beautiful function of maternity
itself, but were extraneous factors quite apart from it; but there was
no doubt, he declared, that the affection came from within, all the
same, and that the youthful poet's idea was only a pleasant fiction.
The poet in the case was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, needless to
say now, though he was laboring under the heinous crime of being a
young man, and did indulge in occasional poetry, he was entirely in
the right, and the distinguished old professor entirely in the wrong.
No little denunciation was heaped upon the devoted head of Holmes,
however, for his strenuous humanitarian work with regard to this
subject. It cost Holmes some of his medical friends and not a little
practice for some time. Even in America, then the land of the free,
there was a strong conservatism that made the introduction of new
ideas a very difficult and almost a dangerous thing.

The man who worked out the same idea to a practical {407} effect in
Europe met with even more determined opposition than did our own Dr.
Holmes. I refer, of course, to Semmelweiss, who, while teaching
obstetrics in Vienna, realized that it was the students and doctors
engaged