DEFINITION AND SYNONYMS.--By parametritis is understood an inflammation of the cellular or connective tissue near the uterus and beneath the pelvic peritoneum, including principally the locality close to the lateral margin of the uterus between the layers of the broad ligaments, although embracing also all of the various spaces where connective tissue abounds--viz. between the peritoneal folds which form the utero-sacral and utero-vesical ligaments. I think it a better name than pelvic cellulitis or peri-uterine inflammation, because it more correctly expresses the primary location of the disease than any other. The disease has been described under many other appellations, among which have been pelvic abscess and peri-uterine phlegmon. ETIOLOGY.--Parametritis does not occur before puberty, and rarely before the great predisposing causes, abortion and injury at parturition, have prepared the parts--opened up the channel--for the more ready advance of the inflammatory process. This is easily understood when we remember how compactly bound together are these ligamentous folds, and how small the cellular-tissue spaces are before impregnation when compared with the condition of the parts after the function of gestation has been performed. Even were no accident to occur to interfere with the perfect involution of the parts which enter into the process of the expulsion of the product of conception, the tissues would probably always remain more vulnerable than before the gestation had occurred. But when the retrograde change which is necessary to perfect involution is retarded, a condition of relaxation and looseness of the parts results which increases many fold the liability to the affection. The blood-vessels and lymphatics remain large, and the connective-tissue cells are not only larger in size, but a cell-proliferation is probably induced as a result of the increased amount of blood-supply. Then a certain low condition of the general nutrition, a diathesis or an inflammatory tendency, no doubt act as predisposing causes of this disease. Now, add to the predisposing causes the injury which probably always attends abortion, and that which so often results from parturition proper, and a condition results which I believe to be the cause of parametritis in the majority of the cases.