182 LOUIS PASTEUR 



Puerperal fever, the great affliction of child- 

 bearing women, enlisted his particular interest. 

 For a long time it was not recognized that this 

 trouble was contagious, and it is one of the services 

 of Dr. O. W. Holmes, who is so well known as a 

 man of letters, and so little known as a physician 

 and professor of anatomy, that he brought forward 

 convincing evidence that puerperal fever is a trans- 

 missible disease and is frequently conveyed through 

 the hands and instruments of the physician. Cer- 

 tain lying-in hospitals had an unenviable record for 

 fatalities among child-bearing women. In 1856 

 The Paris Maternity Hospitals had in less than six 

 weeks 64 deaths out of 347 confinements. Epi- 

 demics of puerperal fever frequently swept through 

 maternity hospitals which were commonly the worst 

 possible places for bearing children. 



Pasteur had discovered, in cases of puerperal 

 fever, characteristic rounded microbes appearing 

 commonly in chains like a string of beads, and he 

 affirmed them to be the cause of this disease. 

 "One day," says Roux, "in a discussion on puer- 

 peral fever at the Academy of Medicine one of 

 his most distinguished colleagues was eloquently 

 discoursing upon the causes of epidemics in lying- 

 in hospitals; Pasteur interrupted him from his 



