Where the mother does not intend to nurse her child, a different plan of treatment must be adopted: the shoulders should be lightly covered, cold evaporating lotions applied to the breasts, and the bowels freely opened by saline laxatives, her diet must be abstemious until the fulness of the breasts subsides, and she ought not to take much fluid: where there is a disposition to febrile action, an antimonial may be advantageously combined with the salines. In most instances the milk is thus checked without any inconvenience, but every now and then much illness and suffering is produced before this can be effected. Wherever, therefore, it is possible for the patient to suckle, the practitioner should urge the importance of it in the strongest terms. "A very serious evil from a woman neglecting this imperious duty is the probability of her becoming more frequently pregnant than the constitution of most females can sustain without permanent injury. A woman who suckles her children has generally an interval of a year and a half or two years between each confinement; but she who without an adequate cause for the omission does not nurse, must expect to bear a child every twelve months, and must reconcile her mind to a shattered constitution and early old age." (Conquest's _Outlines_.) _Management of the lochia._ The management of the lochia constitutes also an important part of the treatment of a natural labour, for the patient's health will be materially affected by any alteration either in its quantity or quality. The lochia usually continues to be a sanguineous discharge for about three days, becoming paler, thin, watery, and of a brownish hue, and gradually disappears: a free lochial discharge for the first forty-eight hours, at least, is one of the greatest safeguards against the different forms of puerperal fever and inflammation which are so justly dreaded by the practitioner, and nothing tends to ensure this desirable object so much as the early application of the child to the breast. It may seem paradoxical to assert, that what prevents hæmorrhage after labour should promote the lochial discharge: we do not attempt to explain why such is the case, but merely mention it as a fact repeatedly observed. As the lochia is secreted from the internal surface of the uterus, it will continue to accumulate in this cavity and that of the vagina so long as the patient remains in the horizontal posture, the direction of the vagina preventing its spontaneous escape: it will, therefore, be desirable to favour its discharge by occasionally altering the position of the patient, and thus prevent its becoming offensive, which it would readily do from the temperature at which it is kept by the surrounding parts, from being in contact with the external air, and from its muco-sanguineous character. In the same way it frequently happens that small coagula of blood lodge in the uterus and rapidly grow putrid. In