A more ignorant statement was never put forth by an intelligent writer. Where are statistics to be found going to prove that among any people, in any land, at a ny time, 10 PER CENT. of all mothers giving birth to offspring perished from the accidents or diseases incident to child-birth? No such statistics can be produce, for the simple reason they do not exist. In the United States we have no official statistics of mortality covering the entire country or reported from year to year. England, however, has recorded the mortality of its people for over half a century. What support does it afford to the assertion that at any time one in every ten mothers, bringing children into the world, perished either from accident or disease? During a period of sixty-two years, from 1851 down to th epresent time, there was not a single year in which mortality of Englishwomen from septic diseases connected with child-birth EVER REACHED EVEN ONE IN A HUNDRED. But this is the figure for all England. Then take the forty-four counties into which England is divided, and from the downs of Devon to the slums of Lancashire, one cannot find a county in all England in which the mortality of mothers from diseases pertaining to child-birth has reached even a quarter of the ratio stated by this medical writer. "From all causes together NOT FOUR DEATHS IN A THOUSAND BIRTHS and miscarriages happened in England and Wales during the first year, seventy-five years ago, that official statistics were gathered; it was a death-rate of five in one thousand the following year."[1] We are not questioning the value of surgical cleanliness; we dispute only the justice of exaggerated and misleading statements concerning any fact capable of scientific demonstration. There can be no doubt that less than half a century ago, in the maternity wards of certain hospitals and in the experience of certain men, there was a death-rate from such ailments far above the average experience of the country; but it was solely due to the ignorance, the criminal blindness and obstinacy of certain men in the medical profession. But a little over seventy years ago, when Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out that this saddest place of mortality was due to want of care on the part of medical men, it was two professors in two of the largest medical schools of America who opposed him; it was Professor Charles Meigs, of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, who laughed to scorn his warnings, and held up to the ridicule of the medical profession the theories that are now accepted as facts. With such men as teachers of medical science, what wonder that for women about to become mothers certain hospitals of that day were little better than slaughter-houses, to enter which was to leave hope behind?[2] But the experience of such hospitals is not the basis upon which Science rests conclusions when they may be ascertained by reference to the statistics of a nation. The murder-rate of