Dr. Collins refers to several instances in
which puerperal fever has appeared to originate from a continued
proximity to patients suffering with typhus.
Such occurrences as those just mentioned, though most important to be
remembered and guarded against, hardly attract our notice in the midst of
the gloomy facts by which they are surrounded. Of these facts, at the
risk of fatiguing repetitions, I have summoned a sufficient number, as I
believe, to convince the most incredulous that every attempt to disguise
the truth which underlies them all is useless.
It is true that some of the historians of the disease, especially Hulme,
Hull, and Leake, in England; Tonnelle, Duges, and Baudelocque, in France,
profess not to have found puerperal fever contagious. At the most they
give us mere negative facts, worthless against an extent of evidence
which now overlaps the widest range of doubt, and doubles upon itself in
the redundancy of superfluous demonstration. Examined in detail, this and
much of the show of testimony brought up to stare the daylight of
conviction out of countenance, proves to be in a great measure unmeaning
and inapplicable, as might be easily shown were it necessary. Nor do I
feel the necessity of enforcing the conclusion which arises spontaneously
from the facts which have been enumerated, by formally citing the
opinions of those grave authorities who have for the last half-century
been sounding the unwelcome truth it has cost so many lives to establish.
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