Read in Section of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women, American Medical Association, May, 1884.
Pajot has said that the term puerperal fever ought to be consigned to the museum of antiquities. Certainly the profession generally replace it by puerperal septicæmia, a disease analogous to surgical septicæmia.
It can be defined an acute, contagious, febrile disease affecting women in childbed. This definition may seem to some not broad enough, for it does not include cases where the unborn infant is affected with a septic peritonitis, or where the undelivered woman has the disease, or where nurses attending cases of puerperal fever are attacked; and those still more extraordinary cases reported nearly 40 years ago by Mr. Storrs, where male subjects were affected by the poison of this disease, and died with peritonitis and pleuritis. But whether the facts referred to have been, as suggested by some, badly observed, or whether they