cxxxiv THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



character, we find a group of the utmost importance to the 

 surgeon and to the obstetrician — between the members of 

 which there is the closest alHance and even interchange- 

 ability — and concerning the possibility of whose de novo 

 origin no surgeon or physician can entertain any reason- 

 able doubt. These are erysipelas, puerperal fever, pyaemia, 

 and hospital gangrene— fearful affections, and all only too 

 easily producible \ Not to mention idiopathic erysipelas, 

 which is also a contagious affection^, how frequently does 

 an ordinary inflammation assume an erysipelatous character 

 in certain individuals — more especially in those who are the 

 subjects of renal disease : and yet hospital gangrene, pyaemia, 

 and puerperal fever, are but different modes in which this 

 morbid process repeats itself in certain constitutions and 

 under certain conditions. How easily erysipelas is set up 

 in some persons by the mere contact of a wounded surface 

 with the fluids of a dead body, is well known ; and how fatal 

 and frequent may be the attacks of puerperal fever due to 

 the same cause has been fully established by melancholy 

 experience at the Vienna Lying-in Hospital. Yet that such 

 effects are in no way attributable to, or comparable with, 

 ordinary processes of putrefaction is also a matter of ab- 

 solute certainty. Again, in certain cases where symptoms 

 of poisoning result from eating mackerel or some shell- 

 fish, we know that these effects are not due to the putres- 

 cence of such articles of food. And similarly, in reference 

 to the many cases in which symptoms of poisoning have 

 been produced in Germany by sausages, we learn from 

 Liebig that ' the sausages are only poisonous at a particular 



^ Sir William Jenner says ('Practical Medicine of To-Day,' i86q, 

 p. g6) :_« We know that the zymotic element which produces contagious 

 pysemia may be generated in the frame of man de novo. A most im- 

 portant problem to be solved is that of the spontaneous origin of other 

 zymotic diseases.' 



2 Sir Thomas Watson's ' Practice of Physic,' vol. ii. p. 917. 



