It was in the month of February, in the year 1888, that a business trip to the southern part of the State forced an absence of several weeks upon me. Some two months before this time I had been called to see a young woman, who had then been sick for several months. She informed me that she had been married nine years, and, not having had any children, she concluded to see a noted specialist of female diseases. By this physician she was told that her sterility was owing to a closure or contraction of the mouth of the womb. This was obviously a wrong diagnosis, and for these reasons: she had always menstruated regularly and without pain, which excludes a constriction; and, secondly, no physician can honestly call a woman sterile until he has examined her husband, who, in the majority of instances, is the cause of his wife’s sterility, because it is he who is sterile. This woman and the doctor agreed, however, on a course of treatment, which was to forcibly open or stretch the mouth and cervical canal of the womb. This by itself is neither a dangerous nor a severe operation, if carefully performed, but care in this case was evidently not exercised, because the young woman was taken with severe inflammation, which caused a pelvic abscess. I found her after two months of suffering. The discharge had become extremely offensive, her body emaciated, and her strength exhausted. I enlarged the opening of the abscess, placed a large drainage tube in the cavity, through which it was washed out, by means of an antiseptic solution of bichloride of mercury, 1 part to 2,000 parts of water, and, by further giving her simple, nutritious food, she improved rapidly, so that the day before I left the city she was at my office, and told me that she felt as well as ever, although not thoroughly recovered. I was absent two weeks, and a few days after my return I incidentally met her husband, who told me that a week after I had left, his wife felt unwell and called in one of her former doctors, who, by the way, rides a hobbyhorse on surgery. This man found a few pimples on her body, which can be found on almost any healthy person, these, he said, were signs of blood poisoning from her abscess, and that an operation to extirpate the abscess, with one or both of her ovaries, was of urgent necessity to save her life from blood poisoning. The deceived woman was of course frightened into giving her consent to the operation, which was undertaken immediately, and, as luck would have it, she recovered; but she might have easily died, which she undoubtedly would have done had this _knife-man_ got her sooner, or before I had restored to her a splendid physical condition, which withstood the unnecessary butchery to which she was induced to submit.