The details of the care and teaching of patients are, of course, specified by a doctor or a medical board, but the effectiveness of the planning, whether for one or several patients, is very largely dependent upon the nurse’s intelligence, interest and conscientiousness, and her ability to teach. This is borne out by the almost uniform recommendations, made by official bodies, for provisions looking toward the reduction of maternal and infant deaths including as they do the following: 1. The employment of public health nurses. (To give home care or instruction or both.) 2. The establishment of prenatal clinics and baby health centers. (In both of these the nurse aids in supervising and teaching the mother how to take care of herself and her baby.) 3. Trained attendance during labor. (The nurse aids greatly in preparing for and assisting with clean deliveries.) 4. Improved and increased hospital facilities. (There cannot be good hospital work without good nursing.) 5. Prompt and accurate registration of births. (Here, too, the nurse may be helpful by always making sure that the birth has been reported.) Here is no light task nor mean privilege which is set before the nurse and in order to meet them fitly she must be prepared. The indispensable requisites for nursing and teaching the maternity patient, whether at home or in a hospital, are training, an exacting conscience, and genuine concern for her patient as an individual. A certain amount of scientific knowledge is necessary, in this as in any other field, to give the nurse an intelligent background and a kind of definiteness and stability to her work. She should be trained in the essentials of general nursing, of surgical nursing and operating room technique, and in the care of babies. She must of necessity know something of the anatomy and physiology of the female generative organs; the physiological adjustments during pregnancy; the development of the baby within the uterus; the normal process, or mechanism, of labor, and the changes which ordinarily take place during the puerperium. Such information will make clear to her the reasons for the care which she gives to her patient, and accordingly her care will be more intelligent. And she will be better able to recognize the difference between evidences of normal physiological changes and the symptoms of complications. Two of the newer branches of medicine—nutrition and mental hygiene or psychiatry—have a more and more apparent relation to the safety and welfare of the maternity patient, and accordingly are of moment to the maternity nurse. For, it must be remembered, it is the purpose of obstetricians to-day to establish future health for their patients as well as immediate safety. The nurse should endeavor to help with all that the doctor attempts to do toward these ends, and in order to help she must understand.