I have
had no other case of puerperal fever in my own practice for three years,
save those above related, and I do not remember to have lost a patient
before with this disease. While absent, last July, I visited two
patients sick with puerperal fever, with a friend of mine in the country.
Both of them recovered.
"The cases that I have recorded were not confined to any particular
constitution or temperament, but it seized upon the strong and the weak,
the old and the young,--one being over forty years, and the youngest
under eighteen years of age . . . . If the disease is of an
erysipelatous nature, as many suppose, contagionists may perhaps find
some ground for their belief in the fact, that, for two weeks previous to
my first case of puerperal fever, I had been attending a severe case of
erysipelas, and the infection may have been conveyed through me to the
patient; but, on the other hand, why is not this the case with other
physicians, or with the same physician at all times, for since my return
from the country I have had a more inveterate case of erysipelas than
ever before, and no difficulty whatever has attended any of my midwifery
cases?"
I am assured, on unquestionable authority, that "About three years since,
a gentleman in extensive midwifery business, in a neighboring State, lost
in the course of a few weeks eight patients in child-bed, seven of them
being undoubted cases of puerperal fever.
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