Charles Delucena Meigs was an American obstetrician of the nineteenth century who is remembered for his opposition to obstetrical anesthesia and to advocating the idea that physicians' hands could not transmit disease to their patients.
Biography
Meigs was born February 19, 1792, in St. George, Bermuda, the son of Josiah Meigs and Clara Benjamin Meigs. He died June 22, 1869, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1817. In 1818 he was awarded an honorary degree of M.D. from Princeton University. Meigs specialized in obstetrics and was for a long time the acknowledged leader in this branch of medicine. In 1841, he became professor of obstetrics and diseases of women in the Jefferson Medical College, until his retirement in 1861. Meigs was a lifelong opponent of obstetric anesthesia. In 1856, he warned against the morally "doubtful nature of any process that the physicians set up to contravene the operations of those natural and physiological forces that the Divinity has ordained us to enjoy or to suffer". His work "On The Nature, Signs, and Treatment of Childbed Fevers" discussed in detail the proposition that women were at risk of disease in dirty environments. He looked at both sides of the idea that doctors could convey childbed fever on their hands on the grounds and quoted Dr. D. Rutter asking, "Did he carry it on his hands? But a gentleman's hands are clean". He weighs "contagion" and "non-contagion" as causes. On the contagion side he is in great favor of "purifying the whole hospital". He cites Dr. Robert Collin's in 1829 as having used chorine gas in a ward, painting the floor and woodwork with chloride of lime mixed with water, and finishing with whitewashing the ward and scouring the blankets and heating them to 130 degrees. His feelings on the matter of contagion were distilled into "Is contagion a truth? Then, for heaven's sweet sake, I implore you not to lay your impoisoned hands upon her who is committed to your science and skill and charitable goodness, only for her safety and comfort, and not that you should, after collecting fees, soon return her to her friends a putrid corpse." He was active as a translator from French. His translation of Gobineau's Typhaines Abbey was published in 1869. Until his death he corresponded with the book's author. He is interred at Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, in Section I, Plot 71 A son, Montgomery C. Meigs, achieved distinction as Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army during the American Civil War.
