The causes of disease, in the mean
time, have been less earnestly studied in the eagerness of the search for
remedies. Speak softly! Women have been borne out from an old-world
hospital, two in one coffin, that the horrors of their prison-house might
not be known, while the very men who were discussing the treatment of the
disease were stupidly conveying the infection from bed to bed, as
rat-killers carry their poisons from one household to another. Do not
some of you remember that I have had to fight this private-pestilence
question against a scepticism which sneered in the face of a mass of
evidence such as the calm statisticians of the Insurance office could not
listen to without horror and indignation? ["The Contagiousness of
Puerperal Fever."--N. E. Quar. Jour. of Medicine and Surgery, April,
1843. Reprinted, with Additions. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1855.] Have
we forgotten what is told in one of the books published under our own
sanction, that a simple measure of ventilation, proposed by Dr. John
Clark, had saved more than sixteen thousand children's lives in a single
hospital? How long would it have taken small doses of calomel and
rhubarb to save as many children? These may be useful in prudent hands,
but how insignificant compared to the great hygienic conditions! Causes,
causes, and again causes,--more and more we fall back on these as the
chief objects of our attention.
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