“... {{w|Charles Delucena Meigs|Charles D. Meigs}} and Hugh Hodge, Philadelphia's leading teachers of {{w|obstetrics}} in the 1840s and 1850s were vociferous in rejecting the suggestion that {{w|Postpartum infections|puerperal fever}} might be contagious, indeed often spread by the obstetrician himself ... The intensity of their response suggests that something more than mere intellectual difference was involved; one of the roots of their hostility to a contagionist point of view lay in the threat it implied for the physician's status, especially in relation to female patients.”