[15] Dr. Morton was a classmate of Dr. Sewall when both were students of Dr. Zakrzewska at the New England Female Medical College. She had spent four years in study at the Paris Maternité during the last two of which she had served as assistant teacher. She returned to Boston in 1867 to begin the practice of her profession. She then became connected with the New England Hospital, her first appointment being on the staff of the Dispensary. Here she became the successor of Dr. Zakrzewska, the latter resigning from this branch of the work and leaving it entirely to the constantly growing number of younger medical women. [16] (p. 355) There are two great causes of sickness in our lying-in wards. First, mental distress during pregnancy, caused by poverty or neglect; second, the exposure and fatigue which many endure before coming to us. One young girl, late last fall, had been sleeping for a week in outhouses. Another came in the cold winter weather, after wandering in a bewildered condition in the streets with wet skirts and no stockings, searching for some place of shelter in her distress. Another when she entered was very sick with acute pleurisy and pneumonia, so that even before her delivery her life was threatened. Several cases of intermittent fever and one of typhus fever were admitted under such circumstances that we could not avoid taking them without being guilty of inhumanity. Two women in a comatose condition from puerperal convulsions were also taken in. One of these last was restored to health, while the other never recovered consciousness. We have taken in several babies who were so poisoned with patented nostrums that only the most vigorous treatment with antidotes could rouse them, and weeks of the most assiduous nursing were necessary to restore their enfeebled vitality. Some of you saw in one of the wards the wretched little creature who was brought by its mother to us in a comatose state, with the skin drawn loosely over its bones and its half-closed glassy eyes sunk deeply in their sockets. This child had been boarded out by its mother while she worked at service, and it had been gradually declining until at the age of three and one-half months, it weighed but seven and one-half pounds. This was an extreme case, but frequently a practiced eye will detect the same process going on. Often when I am called to a sick child, I recognize in the ashy hue, sunken eyes and other well-known symptoms, the work of some “soothing syrup” or other equally pernicious drug. Pitiful indeed is the fate of babies deprived of their natural guardians and subjected to the influence of these infamous nostrums.