INTRODUCTION 13 



no tongue can tell the heart-breaking calamity they have 

 caused; they have closed the eyes just opened upon a 

 new world of love and happiness; they have bowed the 

 strength of manhood into dust; they have cast the help- 

 lessness of infancy into strangers' arms or bequeathed 

 it, with less cruelty, the death of its dying parent. 

 There is no tone deep enough for regret and no voice 

 loud enough for warning. The woman about to become 

 a mother or with her newborn infant on her bosom should 

 be the object of trembling care and sympathy wherever 

 she bears her tender burden or stretches her aching 

 limbs. The very outcast upon the streets has pity upon 

 her sister in degradation when the seal of promised 

 maternity is Impressed upon her. The remorseless 

 vengeance of the law, brought down upon its victim by 

 a machinery as sure as destiny, is arrested in its fall by 

 a word which reveals her transient claim for mercy. 

 The solemn prayer of the liturgy singles out her sorrows 

 from the multiplied trials of life, to plead for her in the 

 hour of peril. God forbid that any member of the 

 profession to which she trusts her life, doubly precious 

 at that eventful period, should hazard it negligently, 

 unadvisedly, or selfishly." 



In 1847 Semmelweis, of Vienna, forged a link in the 

 chain of evidence which was at last to demonstrate the 

 identity of this unknown foe and give man a fighting 

 chance for life. Semmelweis noted a high rate of mor- 

 tality for puerperal fever in a hospital ward, the attend- 



