Now a moment's reflection will show that the
number of cases of serious consequences ensuing from the dissection of
the bodies of those who had perished of puerperal fever is so vastly
disproportioned to the relatively small number of autopsies made in this
complaint as compared with typhus or pneumonia (from which last disease
not one case of poisoning happened), and still more from all diseases put
together, that the conclusion is irresistible that a most fearful morbid
poison is often generated in the course of this disease. Whether or not
it is sui generis, confined to this disease, or produced in some others,
as, for instance, erysipelas, I need, not stop to inquire.
In connection with this may be taken the following statement of Dr.
Rigby. "That the discharges from a patient under puerperal fever are in
the highest degree contagious we have abundant evidence in the history of
lying-in hospitals. The puerperal abscesses are also contagious, and may
be communicated to healthy lying-in women by washing with the same
sponge; this fact has been repeatedly proved in the Vienna Hospital; but
they are equally communicable to women not pregnant; on more than one
occasion the women engaged in washing the soiled bed-linen of the General
Lying-in Hospital have been attacked with abscess in the fingers or
hands, attended with rapidly spreading inflammation of the cellular
tissue.
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