England and New Zealand, as countries, have pointed the way toward accomplishing a nation-wide reduction of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity by making provision for widely organized prenatal care. They recognize the problem as one of public concern. They get at the heart of it: ignorance on one hand and poor or inadequate care on the other. They apply a practical solution, comprising a system of preventive, instructive prenatal care, together with improved and increased facilities for medical and nursing care at the time of delivery and afterward. This country has been strangely laggard in making widespread, organized effort along these lines, to safeguard its mothers and babies, through prenatal care. But sporadic, volunteer effort has been made in certain cities, and has been crowned with brilliant success. The first of these attempts in this country was made in Boston, in 1909, with a maternity nurse working under the auspices of the Women’s Municipal League. The work, which was established by Mrs. William Lowell Putnam, was designed to show what could be accomplished by intensive work in a small group of city mothers, and suggest the feasibility of its extension to larger numbers. “The routine, which has been evolved through a five-year experiment by the Prenatal Committee of the Women’s Municipal League,” says Mrs. Putnam, “has reduced the infant deaths, among those cared for by a third to one-half, as compared with cases not receiving this care. Still-births have been cut in half. Premature births have been reduced to seven-tenths of one per cent. These results were obtained by supervision during pregnancy only, and at a cost of less than $3.00 per patient; an expense which the patients were always encouraged to meet if possible.