In writing this book on obstetrical nursing I have been influenced by certain steadily deepening impressions which have been received in the course of my contact with maternity work in this country, Canada and England during the past twenty years. It has been borne in upon me, in the first place, that very often there is something akin to bewilderment among those nurses who have been trained to care for patients according to the teachings of one group of obstetricians and who later find themselves nursing the patients of other doctors who hold different, or even opposite views. And not infrequently I have found in the nurses a degree of loyalty to their training which made them sceptical, or even intolerant, of nursing methods which differed from those which they had been taught. I have become convinced, therefore, that a book on obstetrical nursing which would be helpful to and widen the outlook of all nurses, no matter where nor by whom trained, must of necessity describe the underlying principles of obstetrical nursing and offer a survey of the nursing methods which are employed in maternity wards and hospitals of recognized excellence and in the practice of acknowledged authorities upon obstetrics. This is, I am aware, a unique attitude, for the present text books on obstetrics for nurses reflect, in each instance, the wishes of one doctor, almost entirely, or advocate the methods employed in one hospital. My experience in teaching obstetrical nursing makes me feel that a parallel description of dissimilar nursing procedures serves to broaden the nurse’s attitude toward her work and her grasp of the entire subject, both because she becomes aware of the fact that methods, other than those with which she is familiar, are employed in hospitals of high standing and because she appreciates the fact that these unfamiliar methods may be as efficacious as those in which she has become expert. Accordingly I have devoted the better part of the past year and a half to a study of the scope and methods of the present training in maternity nursing in several hospitals, in this country and Canada, in which the obstetrical work is of a conspicuously high character, and have presented a composite of this teaching in the succeeding pages. But that there might not be apparent inconsistencies in the different methods of maternity care described, I have given an explanation of the purposes and general principles of the care, including nursing, which the nurse is likely to find is given to all obstetrical patients, the country over.