Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/66

 lvi INTRODUCTION

The greatest discovery ever made in the field of obstetrics is without a shadow of doubt the fact that puerperal fever is highly contagious and transportable by the physician from one patient to another. This dis- covery was made by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who issued a clarion appeal to the profession in 1843, in which he declares "the disease known as puerperal fever is so far contagious as to be frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses"! ("The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever," "New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery," 1842-3, vol. i).

Most great discoveries have been heralded by premonitory suggestive notes showing a trend of human thought, but this one, the greatest of all, sprang complete in all its important details from Holmes's brain. (Osier, "An Alabama Student and Other Biographical Essays," 1908.) (J. Whitridge Williams, " The History of Obstetrics in the United States up to 1860," "American Gynecology," 1903, vol. iii.)

Charles D. Meigs (1792-1869) was particularly vehement in opposing Holmes's views ("The Nature, Treatment and Signs of Childbed Fever," 1854), and Holmes answered the philippics of Meigs and Hodge ("The Non-contagiousness of Puerperal Fever," 1852) by a second one in 1855 on "Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence," Boston, 1855, to which he appended the first. This writing paved the way for the modern antiseptic regime in obstetrics.

J. P. White, of Buffalo (1811-1881), was the first to establish an ob- stetric clinic in America, in 1850, where the act of parturition was shown before a class. This new departure raised a storm of popular and even professional wrath and opposition. White's work as a teacher has culmi- nated in our day in the splendid clinical teachings of our obstetricians in the various leading medical schools.

Chief among the obstetric works of a high scientific order come the studies of George J. Engelmann, of St. Louis, who has written an elaborate monograph upon " Labor Among Primitive Peoples," etc. One of Engel- mann's last and most important works was comparative study of the function of menstruation. ("Transactions American Gynecological Society," vol. xxvi, 1901.)

That great statistican, Robert P. Harris, of Philadelphia, awards the first Cesarean section in America to Prevost, of Donaldsonville, Louisiana, who operated four times successfully prior to 1830, losing but one mother and operating twice on one woman.

We cannot pass the name of R. P. Harris without a merited tribute to this great writer, for the rehabilitation of the Cesarean section in modern times, a result of his innumerable clear writings upon this subject.

Braxton Hicks in England, in 1860, advocated combined cephalic version, but Marmaduke B. Wright, of Cincinnati, Ohio, had in "Difficult