Fortunately for the race, a few brave spirits in the medical profession decided to defy tradition and study babies as controllable human machines rather than as dispensations of a more or less kindly Providence. They found that babies born healthy and normal could be kept that way; that babies born puny and delicate could be made sturdy and strong; that even babies born with inherited defects, physical and mental, could be so treated that they would develop into useful, self-supporting citizens, where once they were consigned to that hideous human scrap-heap, the institutions for defective and feeble-minded children. Only those of us who have followed the work of specialists in children’s diseases—pediatrists, as they are known in the medical profession—can appreciate what marvels have been worked in children born without the birthright of good health. Now these men are going farther. They stand behind the twentieth-century campaign for public education among women in the care and feeding of children. They have rent the veil of mystery which so long has surrounded medical learning; they have written books for mothers, couched not in dictionary-defying terms, but in simple English which the average mother can understand; they have given public talks to mothers on infant feeding; and now they are leading the movement for health conferences between parents, physicians, and health officers—city, county, and state—and for what are known as Better Babies Contests, where babies are brought by their parents for examination in physical and mental development. All these signs indicate a new and popular appreciation of what is known as preventive medicine. The broad-minded physician practises preventive medicine. The progressive mother works with the progressive physician, and the baby profits by the combination. To-day there is little excuse for a colicky, crying, sickly baby in the family circle. Except in rare cases, when the baby’s poor condition does not improve under intelligent mother-care, modern medical science can effect a cure. What generally stands between the sick baby and its cure to-day is ignorance or tradition on the part of the parent, who clings to the belief that strong babies are born to live, that weak babies are born to die, and that the Creator has decreed it! In reality the Creator should not be held responsible for the physical future of the child. Its normal development is practically in the hands of the mother. In the midst of this magnificent campaign for the intelligent care and feeding of infants, she has no right to remain ignorant. Lectures, conferences, and books are at her command; and what this simple preventive medicine teaches her to do for her child she is morally bound to perform.