“The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses.” O. W. Holmes, 1843. THE NEGATIVE. “The result of the whole discussion will, I trust, serve, not only to exalt your views of the value and dignity of our profession, but to divest your minds of the overpowering dread that you can ever become, especially to woman, under the extremely interesting circumstances of gestation and parturition, the minister of evil; that you can ever convey, in any possible manner, a horrible virus, so destructive in its effects, and so mysterious in its operations as that attributed to puerperal fever.”--Professor Hodge, 1852. “I prefer to attribute them to accident, or Providence, of which I can form a conception, rather than to a contagion of which I cannot form any clear idea, at least as to this particular malady.”--Professor Meigs, 1852. “... in the propagation of which they have no more to do, than with the propagation of cholera from Jessore to San Francisco, and from Mauritius to St. Petersburg.”--Professor Meigs, 1854. --------------------- “I arrived at that certainty in the matter, that I could venture to foretell what women would be affected with the disease, upon hearing by what midwife they were to be delivered, or by what nurse they were to be attended, during their lying-in; and, almost in every instance, my prediction was verified.”--Gordon, 1795. “A certain number of deaths is caused every year by the contagion of puerperal fever, communicated by the nurses and medical attendants.” Farr, in Fifth Annual Report of Registrar-General of England, 1843. “... boards of health, if such exist, or, without them, the medical institutions of a country, should have the power of coercing, or of inflicting some kind of punishment on those who recklessly go from cases of puerperal fevers to parturient or puerperal females, without using due precaution; and who, having been shown the risk, criminally encounter it, and convey pestilence and death to the persons they are employed to aid in the most interesting and suffering period of female existence.” --Copland's Medical Dictionary, Art. Puerperal States and Diseases, 1852. “We conceive it unnecessary to go into detail to prove the contagious nature of this disease, as there are few, if any, American practitioners who do not believe in this doctrine.”--Dr. Lee, in Additions to Article last cited. -----------------------