The rule is that women shall be delivered in quarters, provided there be decent accommodation. At a number of the larger stations, where suitable married quarters have not yet been fully provided, there are female hospitals, attached to which, as we have already seen, is a delivery and lying-in ward, with the usual offices. In the specially constructed hospitals the wards are of a good size, well-lighted, warmed and ventilated. If all the beds were occupied, the space would be 1,300 cubic feet per patient. But this is an event which rarely or never happens, so that there is always plenty of room and good ventilation. If[19] a woman requires admission, her husband applies to the medical authorities for a ticket. No woman with a disease considered to be infectious is admitted. The women usually follow their ordinary avocations until obliged to proceed to hospital by imminent labour. They are taken there in cabs, all the necessary arrangements for the lying-in having been made, if possible, by previous intimation. The woman is delivered in the delivery ward, and is thence transferred to the lying-in ward. As a rule, the lying-in pavilion in these female hospitals is distinct in all its arrangements for nursing from the pavilion for general cases. Infectious cases are not received into the same hospital, except at Aldershot. In these hospitals for soldiers’ wives the time which elapses from the admission to the discharge of the women is usually ten, and in some cases twelve days. At Aldershot four ‘Sisters’ are now at work in the soldiers’ wives’ hospital. One was trained as midwife, and took charge of the midwifery cases early in 1867. The Sister midwife has sole charge of the lying-in women for five or six days. They are then passed into a third ward, and are nursed by the Sisters who attend the ordinary cases (which are, however, of course in a separate ward). The Sisters do not help the midwife, as a rule. Only the Superior, on an emergency, and one for scrubbing floors periodically, enter the midwifery wards (i.e. the delivery and lying-in wards). In 1869 Aldershot had no fatal case among the lying-in women. [The ‘infection wards’ are nursed by ordinary nurses, and in cases of children by the parents.] It will be seen, therefore, that at Aldershot the midwife has nothing to do with the general cases, and the matron is not now the midwife. Both there and at Woolwich the lying-in nursing is quite separate from the general nursing. The medical officer remarks, as to the two deaths in 1869 at Woolwich: ‘Two cases of puerperal peritonitis after bad labours, requiring instrumental and other assistance, died, but the disease did not extend. My opinion is that the coldness of the wards, though objectionable, has a great deal to do with the comparative immunity hitherto enjoyed as regards the germination and extension of contagious diseases.’ It need scarcely be said that these new hospitals are models of cleanliness.