 Sometime during the summer of 1842 J.B.S. Jackson " asked the opinion of the Society as to the contagion of puerperal fever and the probability of physicians communicating it from one patient to another " following the death of a physician who had treated an infected woman , and the subsequent infection of the patients he had treated in the interim . This piqued the interest of Holmes , who , after a period of research , presented his essay , " The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever " , to the Society on February 13 , 1843 ; it was later published at the Society 's request in the April issue of the New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery . 
