The Hunterian oration on the etiology of puerperal fever : delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Hunterian Society / by Alfred Lewis Galabin.

  • Galabin, Alfred Lewis, 1843-1913.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Hunterian oration on the etiology of puerperal fever : delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Hunterian Society / by Alfred Lewis Galabin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    THE ETIOLOGY OF PUERPERAL FEVER. I need hardly remind you that the genius of Hunter was not limited to the field of surgery and general pathology, but that he devoted some of his attention also to subjects connected with obstetrics. Thus his name is immortalised in the description of the several parts of the decidua of the gravid uterus, and especially in that term decidua serotina, whose late Latinity is apt to perplex students having minds imbued with classical models of a purer age. No one can comprehend this nomenclature without mastering the Hunterian theory of decidual formation. In undertaking, therefore, to address you, I venture, as an obstetrician, to select an obstetrical subject, and to direct your attention to some of the problems connected with Puerperal Fevers. I do so the more readily, because many of these problems are yet unsolved, and their solution demands especially three things in which Hunter was pre-eminent—painstaking clinical observation, scientific experi- ment, and sound reasoning. While I cannot hope to bring before you novel facts, I shall be repaid if I can obtain the aid of some members of the Hunterian Society in investigating these questions by Hunterian methods. Modern discoveries as to the connection of microscopic organisms with disease, which have thrown such a flood of light on the nature of spreading inflammations, of several infectious diseases, and on some diseases not hitherto considered infectious, have not failed consider- ably to modify opinions as to the nature of puerperal fever. No other rational theory has, indeed, ever been proposed to account for the existence of an infectious or contagious disease, which may spread indefinitely from one individual to another, but is limited by time in the individual, except the theory that it is dependent upon parasitic organisms. A merely chemical ferment may indeed suffice, although present in very minute quantity, to kill an individual. A second may even be inoculated from the first, and suffer in minor de- gree, as when the hand is wounded in dissecting an animal dead from snake-bite. But all experiment shows that such a chemical ferment, if free from organisms, is incapable of causing a disease spreading from one animal to another progressively. The Darwinian theory of pangenesis, indeed, asserts that the cells of the body give off germs of a minuteness far beyond the reach of any present or any future microscope ; and that it is owing to the pre- sence of such germs, derived not only from the parent, but from fur- ther ancestors, in the ovum and the spermatozoa, that the progeny grows to resemble its parents, and even reproduces traits of its long- past ancestors. However incredible such a theory may appear at first sight, it will hardly be possible, in any easier and simpler way, to ac-