But above all the nurse must remember that severe hemorrhage from a relaxed uterus can almost always be prevented if the fundus is kept hard, by massage when necessary, during the first hour or so after delivery. =Puerperal infection= is usually regarded as a condition which results from the entrance of infective bacteria into the female generative tract during labor or the puerperium, to distinguish it from other infections which may occur coincidently with the puerperal state, but not necessarily be related to it. Puerperal infection is one of the most destructive and most dreaded of the complications which may overtake the obstetrical patient, and has evidently been so considered since the days of Hippocrates. Until recent years this veritable scourge was so utterly baffling that it was regarded as more or less of a dispensation of a Divine Providence and therefore to be accepted with the same philosophical resignation as earthquakes and cyclones. In dramatic contrast to this unresisting attitude is the present knowledge concerning the cause and prevention of this disease, and the general belief that it is a wound infection and therefore practically preventive; that it is to be ascribed to the carelessness of mankind rather than to the indifference of Providence. This change is due very largely to the devoted work of three men who were deeply stirred by the tragic frequency with which young women laid down their lives in so-called “child bed fever.” These men were Ignaz Semmelweiss, Oliver Wendell Holmes, better known to Americans as poet and humorist, and Louis Pasteur, each contributing his own special observations to the sum of knowledge which was to mean so much to mothers of the future. Also the theories of Lister concerning antisepsis and the inauguration of the use of sterile rubber gloves by Dr. Halsted, of Johns Hopkins Hospital, has had the same life-saving effect upon obstetrical patients as upon all surgical patients. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes read a paper before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement, entitled “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” In this paper he presented striking evidence that in many instances, something was conveyed by doctor or nurse, from an ill person to a maternity patient with puerperal fever as a result. He was attacked and ridiculed for his theories and some of the leading obstetricians declared that it was an insult to their intelligence to expect them to believe that creatures too small to be seen by the naked eye could work such havoc.